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Daily Record
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Harry Potter film with 96% rating dubbed 'perfect as entire franchise ranked
The Harry Potter films are a mix of fantasy and adventure, and we've ranked all 10 of them from best to worst, according to their Rotten Tomatoes scores - so you can see how they stack up Author J.K. Rowling is in the spotlight once more for her controversial views on the trans community, this time drawing criticism from Stephen Fry – the voice behind all seven Harry Potter audiobooks – who has labelled her a "lost cause". Despite the controversy surrounding its creator, the Harry Potter film series has continued to fare well. And now all the movies, including the less-celebrated Fantastic Beasts spin-offs, have been ranked by Rotten Tomatoes, with some doing better than others. Topping the list as the most acclaimed adaptation is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, hailed as a fitting adieu to the cherished magical realm by both critics and fans alike. At the opposite end of the spectrum sits the 2018 release, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which failed to win over many viewers, reports the Express. Below is the Rotten Tomatoes ranking of the Harry Potter films, from the highest to lowest rated Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 96% Helmed by director David Yates One critic perfectly captured the sentiment towards the final instalment, stating: "For a grand finale to a truly epic, good-natured franchise, this is a perfect goodbye that's very hard to beat." Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) Rotten Tomatoes rating: 96% Directed by Alfonso Cuarón The third instalment in the Harry Potter film series garnered effusive accolades from reviewers, particularly lauding Cuarón's contribution: "Prisoner of Azkaban is a standout entry in the Harry Potter franchise - it establishes an effective tone under Alfonso Cuarón's stellar direction." Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 88% Directed by Mike Newell Describing the fourth film, a succinct Wall Street Journal critique exclaimed: "It's downright scary how good this movie is." Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) Rotten Tomatoes rating: 83% In the directorial hands of David Yates One reviewer's insight into the penultimate Harry Potter chapter spoke volumes: "The strangest thing about the new Harry Potter movie is not that it's unusually good, which it is, but that it unequivocally illustrates just how poorly we've been served by the previous five instalments in the franchise." Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) Rotten Tomatoes rating: 82% Helmed by Chris Columbus Columbus' second venture into the wizarding world was met with observations of progress: "Director Chris Columbus has pushed the envelope farther, made a sequel that is pacier and more swashbuckling. Yet it still feels cautious and reined-in." Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) Rotten Tomatoes rating: 80% The first foray with Chris Columbus at the helm. Critics were unanimously taken by Harry Potter's initial cinematic adventure, noting: "The quickest, zappiest two and a half hours of entertainment you'll ever see." Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) Rotten Tomatoes rating: 78% Directed by David Yates, the fifth instalment in the Potter series didn't quite live up to expectations, with one critic bluntly stating: "Brought me straight back to one of the most enduring of childhood feelings: boredom." Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) also saw Yates at the helm Rotten Tomatoes rating: 77% The seventh film received its fair share of criticism as one reviewer observed: "The trouble with Harry, as becomes clear from this seventh and penultimate installment, is not that we have lost the plot -- the film is as tangled and as corkscrewed as Bonham Carter's hair -- but that we are in danger of losing everything else." Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), another Yates-directed venture, struggled to impress, with a commentator noting: "The film strains considerably under the weight of all its plot lines-it's never fun to be the movie with the origin story." Rotten Tomatoes rating: 74% The subsequent Fantastic Beasts instalment, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022), directed by Yates too, faced similar critique. Rotten Tomatoes rating: 46% A disappointed reviewer remarked: "Even taken on its own merits, it's a case of a sequel too far. There's no getting away from the fact that, without Harry Potter, this (movie) doesn't seem to know where to go." Furthermore, the prior Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) had also seen Yates in the director's chair. With a disappointing 36% rating, The Crimes of Grindelwald sits at the bottom of the Harry Potter series, receiving a drubbing from both critics and cinema-goers alike. One reviewer described it as: "About as exciting as a trip to Hogwarts's most neglected lavatory." For those in the UK looking for a magical fix, the complete Harry Potter collection is now on Netflix, ready for streaming. Across the pond, US folks can find all the Harry Potter films up for rent on Amazon Prime Video.
Geek Tyrant
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Fun Trailer For Netflix Mystery Comedy THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB Starring Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan — GeekTyrant
Netflix has released a fun new trailer for their murder mystery comedy The Thursday Murder Club , featuring an all-star cast that includes Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie, as well as Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Tom Ellis, Jonathan Pryce, David Tennant, Paul Freeman, Geoff Bell, Richard E. Grant, and Ingrid Oliver. The film is directed by Chris Columbus ( Adventures in Babysitting , Home Alone & Home Alone 2 , Mrs. Doubtfire , Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone & Chamber of Secrets , Rent ). The screenplay is written by Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote, adapted from Richard Osman's book of the same name. The synopsis reads: 'Based on Richard Osman's bestselling novel of the same name, The Thursday Murder Club follows four irrepressible retirees - Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), Ron (Pierce Brosnan), Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) and Joyce (Celia Imrie) - who spend their time solving cold case murders for fun. 'When an unexplained death occurs right on their own doorstep, their casual sleuthing takes a thrilling turn as they find themselves with a real whodunit on their hands. This looks like it will be a fun watch akin to Only Murders in the Building , with another really fun cast. Netflix will debut The Thursday Murder Club on August 28th, 2025. Check out the trailer below:
San Francisco Chronicle
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
California's version of ‘The Way We Were' can be seen in SoCal and NorCal
Here are a couple of California stories — one about a fading landmark district, the other about a crooked railroad. One is a Southern California classic. The other is in San Francisco's backyard. It's always a bit of a culture shock for San Franciscans to spend time in Southern California. Maybe it's the freeways, the traffic jams, the palm trees, the Los Angelesness of the whole place. 'Look,' said my companion, 'they are selling Dodger Dogs in the gas stations.' Times never stand still in L.A. Everybody's tailgating. Slow streets? That must be one of those quaint Northern California affectations. So it was a shock to turn off Wilshire Boulevard and into Westwood Village, what one radio station once called 'the hippest place in L.A.' There was a time, and not long ago, that Westwood Village was packed with people on weekends. There were 20 movie screens, hundreds of stores and restaurants and so many cars trying to crowd into the district that automobiles were prohibited. It was right next to the UCLA campus, the ultimate college hangout. More recently the UCLA magazine featured a long piece about the heyday of hip Westwood. The title: 'The Way We Were.' That was then. Last weekend, Westwood Village was nearly deserted. Plenty of parking in the vast garages. Lots of 'For lease' signs on storefronts. The landmark Regency Village Theatre, famous since it opened in 1931 as the Fox Westwood, had a chain-link fence around it. The theater was the classic movie palace in the Golden Age of Hollywood, with a 170-foot-tall white tower, decorated with stucco lions and griffins, part Spanish colonial revival, part showbiz, all Southern California. Across the street, the smaller Bruin Theater, a streamlined moderne neon showpiece in its own right, was closed, too. A group of Hollywood heavyweights, including Chris Columbus, Bradley Cooper and Steven Spielberg, plan to reopen and revive the Regency Village Theatre, but the message is clear: San Francisco's struggling downtown is not the only district that has been affected by changing times. Meanwhile, the small Marin County city of Mill Valley will celebrate its own changing times on the Memorial Day weekend when an engine from the crookedest railroad in the world returns to town after 101 years. This was the Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway, and the pride of the line was engine No. 9, which has been restored to its former glory. No. 9 is ticketed for display at Mill Valley's landmark former rail station this weekend and will be the centerpiece of the town's Memorial Day parade Monday. No. 9 will ride on a flatbed truck just behind Mill Valley's shiniest red fire truck from the Old Mill School through downtown and along Miller Avenue to Tamalpais High School. The parade starts at 11 a.m. No. 9 is the last surviving artifact of the mountain railroad which ran from Mill Valley to a terminal just below the summit of Mount Tamalpais starting in 1896. Later there was a branch line to Muir Woods. The railroad was a tourist line, pure and simple, and advertised its winding roadbed (with 281 curves in just over 8 miles) as 'the crookedest railroad in the world' and the ride 'the greatest sight-seeing trip on earth.' Engine No. 9, purchased new from the Heisler Locomotive works in 1921, was the pride of the line, the most powerful engine — a 'thoroughly modern' machine with all-wheel drive. However, it was expensive to operate, and when the railroad ran into financial difficulties in 1924, No. 9 was sold at a bargain rate to a Humboldt County lumber company for use on logging trains. But it was charmed; it survived for a century. The railroad did not. Done in by changing times, it was abandoned in 1930. But the crooked railroad lived in legend. Rail historians and a few old-timers kept the memory alive for another generation. One of the railroad's admirers was Fred Runner, who became aware of the railroad when he stopped by the West Point Inn, built by the railroad in 1904 and still in operation. 'I thought it was a good story that needed to be told,' he said. Besides the West Point Inn, one other artifact had survived: Engine No. 9, then owned by the Pacific Lumber Co. in the mill town of Scotia in Humboldt County. The old engine was sitting in a park for more than 60 years. In the meantime, the lumber industry faded, the mill closed and the old locomotive gathered rust and attracted vandals. Runner and some of his associates formed a group called Friends of No. 9, bought the engine at auction for just over $50,000, spent more than $30,000 moving it to the North Bay and close to $500,000 restoring it. 'We took out tons of rust and rebuilt it,' Runner said. Now No. 9 is in museum quality condition, down to the controls in the cab, the gauges, even the engineer's brake handle. The craftsmanship in restoring the engine was meticulous. 'It's breathtaking, honestly,' Runner said. It's not possible to operate No. 9 under steam. It's just too old. After the Memorial Day parade, No. 9 will go to a temporary home at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento as a featured display. There's talk about a permanent display around Mount Tamalpais. But that's a discussion for another time.
CNA
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNA
Fifty Shades Darker director James Foley dies at 71 after a year-long cancer battle
James Foley, a journeyman director best known for "Glengarry Glen Ross," has died. He was 71. He died earlier this week after a yearlong battle with brain cancer, his representative, Taylor Lomax, said Friday (May 9). In his long and varied career, Foley directed Madonna music videos, 12 episodes of House of Cards and the two Fifty Shades of Grey sequels, but it was his 1992 adaptation of David Mamet's foulmouthed Pulitzer Prize winning play that stood above the rest. Although it wasn't a hit at the time, "Glengarry Glen Ross" wormed its way into the culture and grew into an oft-quoted cult favorite, especially Alec Baldwin's made-for-the-film "always be closing" monologue. Critic Tim Grierson wrote 20 years after its release that it remains "one of the quintessential modern movies about masculinity." He added, "while there are many fine Mamet movies, it's interesting that the best of them was this one – the one he didn't direct." Born on Dec 28, 1953, in Brooklyn, Foley studied film in graduate school at the University of Southern California. Legend has it that Hal Ashby once wandered into a film school party where his short happened to be playing at the time and he took a liking to him. Foley would later attribute his ability to make his first feature, Reckless, a 1984 romantic drama about mismatched teenagers in love starring Daryl Hannah, Aidan Quinn and Adam Baldwin, to the Ashby stamp of approval. It was also the first screenplay credited to Chris Columbus, though there were reports of creative differences. He followed it with the Sean Penn crime drama At Close Range, the Madonna and Griffin Dunne screwball comedy Who's That Girl and the neo-noir thriller After Dark, My Sweet, with Jason Patric. Critic Roger Ebert included After Dark, My Sweet in his great movies list, calling it "one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern film noir" despite having been "almost forgotten." He also directed several music videos for Madonna including Papa Don't Preach, Live to Tell, and Who's That Girl, and an episode of Twin Peaks. Foley adapted John Grisham and worked with Gene Hackman on The Chamber and made the Reese Witherspoon and Mark Wahlberg teenage love-gone-scary thriller Fear, as well as the largely derided Halle Berry and Bruce Willis psychological thriller Perfect Stranger, which was released in 2007. It would be a decade before his next film was released, when he was given the reigns to the Fifty Shades of Grey sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. "For me, what's most challenging is stuff that doesn't involve the actors, oddly enough – in three, there's a big car chase and there's different stunts and stuff and that stuff really bores me," he told The Associated Press at the UK premiere of Fifty Shades Darker. "So when the actors aren't around, that's difficult because the actors give me so much energy and kind of engagement and a car driving by doesn't do the same thing." Foley was not an easily definable director, but that was by design. In 2017, he told The Hollywood Reporter that he had no interest in repeating himself. "I've always just followed my nose, for better or for worse, sometimes for worse," Foley said. "What's best and what's worst (about the industry) are almost the same to me. What's worst is you get pigeonholed and what's best is I haven't been. It means that I'm still making movies, despite hopping all over the place."
CTV News
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
James Foley, ‘Glengarry Glen Ross' and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey' director, dies at 71
James Foley, a journeyman director best known for 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' has died. He was 71. He died earlier this week after a yearlong battle with brain cancer, his representative, Taylor Lomax, said Friday. In his long and varied career, Foley directed Madonna music videos, 12 episodes of 'House of Cards' and the two 'Fifty Shades of Grey' sequels, but it was his 1992 adaptation of David Mamet's foulmouthed Pulitzer Prize winning play that stood above the rest. Although it wasn't a hit at the time, 'Glengarry Glen Ross' wormed its way into the culture and grew into an oft-quoted cult favorite, especially Alec Baldwin's made-for-the-film 'always be closing' monologue. Critic Tim Grierson wrote 20 years after its release that it remains 'one of the quintessential modern movies about masculinity.' He added, 'while there are many fine Mamet movies, it's interesting that the best of them was this one — the one he didn't direct.' Born on Dec. 28, 1953, in Brooklyn, Foley studied film in graduate school at the University of Southern California. Legend has it that Hal Ashby once wandered into a film school party where his short happened to be playing at the time and he took a liking to him. Foley would later attribute his ability to make his first feature, 'Reckless,' a 1984 romantic drama about mismatched teenagers in love starring Daryl Hannah, Aidan Quinn and Adam Baldwin, to the Ashby stamp of approval. It was also the first screenplay credited to Chris Columbus, though there were reports of creative differences. He followed it with the Sean Penn crime drama 'At Close Range,' the Madonna and Griffin Dunne screwball comedy 'Who's That Girl' and the neo-noir thriller 'After Dark, My Sweet,' with Jason Patric. Critic Roger Ebert included 'After Dark, My Sweet' in his great movies list, calling it 'one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern film noir' despite having been 'almost forgotten.' He also directed several music videos for Madonna including 'Papa Don't Preach,' 'Live to Tell,' and 'Who's That Girl,' and an episode of 'Twin Peaks.' Foley adapted John Grisham and worked with Gene Hackman on 'The Chamber' and made the Reese Witherspoon and Mark Wahlberg teenage love-gone-scary thriller 'Fear,' as well as the largely derided Halle Berry and Bruce Willis psychological thriller 'Perfect Stranger,' which was released in 2007. It would be a decade before his next film was released, when he was given the reigns to the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' sequels, 'Fifty Shades Darker' and 'Fifty Shades Freed.' 'For me, what's most challenging is stuff that doesn't involve the actors, oddly enough — in three, there's a big car chase and there's different stunts and stuff and that stuff really bores me,' he told The Associated Press at the UK premiere of 'Fifty Shades Darker.' 'So when the actors aren't around, that's difficult because the actors give me so much energy and kind of engagement and a car driving by doesn't do the same thing.' Foley was not an easily definable director, but that was by design. In 2017, he told The Hollywood Reporter that he had no interest in repeating himself. 'I've always just followed my nose, for better or for worse, sometimes for worse,' Foley said. 'What's best and what's worst (about the industry) are almost the same to me. What's worst is you get pigeonholed and what's best is I haven't been. It means that I'm still making movies, despite hopping all over the place.' Foley is survived by his brother, Kevin Foley, and sisters Eileen and Jo Ann. Lindsey Bahr, The Associated Press
