Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Essential, and more for what it plants than for what it is. The diary at the centre of this film is the first of the objects the last three films are entirely about, and the explanation of what it was comes six films later. A viewer who skips this will be told about it in the sixth film and will have missed watching it happen.

On its own terms it is the longest of the eight and the one where Columbus's faithfulness turns into a liability. The book is a mystery with a lot of incident, almost all of it survives, and the result is a hundred and sixty-one minutes that could comfortably lose twenty. The flying car, the spiders and the duelling club are all good scenes that arrive in a procession rather than a build.

What is genuinely better here is the tone. The school is less welcoming than in the first film, the attacks on students are frightening, and the sequence in the forest with Aragog is closer to horror than anything the series had attempted. Kenneth Branagh's Lockhart is the funniest performance in the eight films.

It is also the last of the ornate, storybook-looking entries. Columbus stepped back after this and the series changed shape immediately. Watch it for the diary and for the sense of what the films were before they grew up.