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A boy named Harry Potter, left with his atrocious Aunt and Uncle to grow up with their spoiled brat son, receives a letter one day.  The Uncle is dead-set against the boy reading the letter, but they keep coming more and more every day.  When he gets to read one of the letters, thanks to a huge hulking bearded man, he discovers that he is to be a student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  Harry goes off to the school and meets all sorts of different people, starts learning how to do fantastical things, and eventually finds out the school has a secret.  Something has been brought into Hogwarts and dark forces are at work to steal it.  Harry and his closest friends have to find out what it is since Harry is inextricably involved by a past he hardly knows.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is a pretty good adventure.  It has a rocky start with totally over the top cliches to the point of more annoyance than amusement but then evens out into the sort of film one would expect from such a wildly popular novel.  The film is a bit long but the pacing does not suffer.  The directing is fairly ho hum.  It was well acted but not stellar.  The plot is fairly sparse, something to be expected with all the bringing the audience and the characters up to speed.  It is not all that original though it does entertain.  The interior sets are expansive and had a lot of work put into them.  The exterior locations, few as they are, were fitting but unremarkable.  The musical score isn't memorable, but obviously wasn't distracting either.  This is a solid, strong, film but far from a classic.

( Thank you for reading my review.
Bob Male)

All ideas, opinions, and information are from the reviewer and are not representative of any company or group involved with the creators and/or staff of the materials being reviewed.