Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)

IMDb Listing
I feel like I’ve spent most of the Harry Potter series impatient with the pace of story advancement. Each movie, it seems, spends the first half hour setting up new developments and the last half hour actually making things happen, while the middle sections are comprised of distractions and wheel-spinning. This installment, though, finds the kids on the run, with little time for any of the minutiae that bogged them down during their time at Hogwarts. So, with my complaints mostly addressed, I found myself fairly content. Plus, I like Ralph Fiennes’s Voldemort, who has much more time in this movie than he had in the last one, and there’s a terrific animated sequence to illustrate a wizard’s fable that came as quite a surprise. All in all, this is as compelling as any Potter film in a good while. 7/10