Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

A red-blooded adventure movie, dripping with atmosphere, filled with the gruesome and the sublime, and surprisingly faithful to the novel.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's eye-filling, well-cast, often very funny and executed with great imagination and flair.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The script is faithful, the actors are just right, the sets, costumes, makeup and effects match and sometimes exceed anything one could imagine.

New Times (L.A.) Gregory Weinkauf

Happily, then, the first movie of the Harry Potter series casts a splendid spell, as screenwriter Steve Kloves has transcribed J.K. Rowling's novel nearly to a T, with precious little tweaked or trimmed.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Can there be higher praise for a motion picture designed to capture a beloved book with fidelity, thoroughness and affection? Only this: They made it better.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

If the movie doesn't ultimately transport us to places The Wizard of Oz once took us, that may be partly because "The Sorcerer's Stone" is just the first chapter, with more magic waiting to be parceled out in the coming years.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Retains (and in many cases, boosts) as much of the spirit [of the book] as you could reasonably expect. And it makes a worthy attempt to duplicate Rowling's engaging sense of humor.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

What saves Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is what created it in the first place: J.K. Rowling's enrapturing imagination. At those sporadic moments when the film allows us to share in Harry's wonder, it lets us recapture our own as well.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

At its best, the film's visual dazzle equals the tasty wordplay of the novel. But it is overlong, overscored, and curiously misshapen.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Columbus has done a rousing job of bringing Rowling's rambunctious story to the screen. The eerie corridors and ever-shifting stairways of Hogwarts are as daunting, haunting, initially bewildering, and ultimately comforting as when Rowling painted them in prose.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Though the film will undoubtedly please the young viewers who flock to it, ultimately many of the book's readers may wish for a more magical incarnation.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

As entertaining as it is amazingly faithful.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

Does it immerse the uninitiated into a new, fabulous world? Yes. To the book's many readers, does this feel like the real "Harry Potter"? For the most part, yes.

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

Absolutely the best single moment, beautifully presented, comes when the orphaned Harry looks in a mirror and sees his parents there. It is brilliant in its simplicity and very moving.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

That sense of déjà vu is at once this Harry Potter's balm and its limitation: many charms, but few surprises.

Newsweek David Ansen

Columbus's Harry Potter has many delights, but the magical alchemy that the book seemed to achieve so effortlessly eludes it.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Is the movie any good? At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when art is defined by commerce, this question is beside the point.

Film Threat Michael Dequina

Yes, this "Harry" does indeed fly -- just don't expect the movie to soar into the higher altitudes of imagination.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It may be long, but it's not boring -- how could it be when jack o' lanterns float lazily overhead in the dining hall, and the venerable Maggie Smith turns into a cat?

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Columbus' film version is fine, and it's bound to make kids happy while simultaneously generating untold box office, but if you haven't yet picked up a copy, don't let the film override the novel; set aside a weekend, dive in, and then head off to the cineplex to take in this well-done companion piece.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

A firm, ringing yes and no on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The best thing about it may be that it will lead many back to read -- or re-read -- the book.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's a very busy movie, designed to appeal to short attention spans, and it leaves you feeling full, but not satisfied, because it's missing the most important ingredient of all: genuine magic.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

All it lacks are the crucial things an inspired director could have provided: spark, soul and magic.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

What's on screen, though, is a cautious approach to cinema wizardry -- broad, colorful strokes and flash-bang effects that turn J.K. Rowling's words into a long, cheerful spectacle with a Muggle soul.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The English cast is fun; but this is more spectacle than story, and the Steve Kloves script deserves better handling than director Chris Columbus -- plus any number of studio deliberators -- gave it.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

This version of the Potter saga is fun and harmless rather than memorable or imaginative. That's certainly no crime.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

There's a palpable avoidance of risk as this new mythology is wheeled gingerly into the marketplace and carefully positioned to zap your pre-sold brain...Solid but uninspired, Harry lacks brio. It's respectable and a bit dull.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

In their hands [Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton or even Steven Spielberg], Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone might have made as terrific a movie as it is a book. When Columbus got the job, however, it was guaranteed only to be a commercial success.

Time Richard Corliss

The film lacks moviemaking buoyancy -- the feeling of soaring in space that Rowling's magic-carpet prose gives the reader. The picture isn't inept, just inert.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is, despite its trickery, that plainest and least surprising of artifacts; the work of art that is exactly the sum of its parts, neither more nor less. [19 Nov 2001, p. 78]

Washington Post Rita Kempley

Potter-philes are sure to get what they want -- if what they want is, in fact, an exacting version of J.K. Rowling's charming children's fantasy. If it's enchantment they are after, that's quite another matter.

Slate David Edelstein

As a movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has no inner life -- no pulse -- of its own: It's secondhand.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Given that movies can now show us everything, the manifestations that Ms. Rowling described could be less magical only if they were delivered at a news conference.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

A clumsily directed, painstakingly faithful adaptation thats heavy on plot, light on nuance, and features in its title role a young newcomer whose most striking quality is an almost preternatural absence of oomph.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

I wish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had developed more of a life of its own instead of being essentially a flat visualization of the book.