Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2

Essential, and it is one continuous climax. The previous film did all the waiting, so this one opens already moving and never stops: a break-in at a bank, a dragon, a return to a school that is already under occupation, and then a siege that occupies most of the running time.

The battle is staged better than it had any right to be, largely because the film keeps returning to small things inside it. The statues being animated to defend the castle, the protective dome going up, a teacher sending students out through a tunnel: each is a moment of an institution behaving like a place people love rather than a location in a fight.

The best scene is not in the battle. The sequence in which Harry sees Snape's memories recontextualises eight films of behaviour in about ten minutes, and Alan Rickman had been playing toward it since 2001 on information almost nobody else on the production had. It is the clearest argument for watching all eight in order.

The flaws are real and small: the final duel is extended well past the book's, the epilogue's ageing makeup is unconvincing, and one or two deaths happen offscreen and are reported rather than felt. It finishes the story properly, which not many eight-film series manage.