Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Rupert Grint, Kenneth Branagh and the rest of the cast

The standing complaint about these films is that they flattened Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) into comic relief. This one makes that harder to hold, because Rupert Grint keeps turning the comedy into character. He plays it into other people's faces rather than out to the audience, whether he is telling Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) that the Whomping Willow did more damage to them than the other way round, or sitting through a Howler from his mother in front of the entire Great Hall.

The Howler is a joke. It is also the scene that shows you his family and his humiliation in the same beat. His wand snaps in the first act and keeps paying out for the rest of the picture, comic and otherwise.

Gilderoy Lockhart (Kenneth Branagh) is the other engine, and the joke survives even as the story darkens. Kenneth Branagh plays him as a man who has fully believed his own publicity, so every scene he walks into arrives with the punchline already loaded.

The film never accounts for him, though. He cannot control a cage of pixies in front of second-years, and nobody in the castle ever asks how he got the job. They may genuinely have had no other applicant. Nobody checks.

Judging the three leads against adult performers like Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith is the wrong test. They are children, and the film needs them to behave like children. On those terms all three are good, and Daniel Radcliffe is the one most often sold short, because Harry Potter's reserve suits a boy raised in a cupboard and Daniel Radcliffe never reaches for a spark the character has no reason to have.

The creature work, the score and how frightening it is

The effects have aged unevenly and it is worth saying which half. The climactic creature still reads as a real threat, helped by how little of it the film shows. Dobby is the half that dates, remarkable in 2002 and now plainly a digital character standing beside a real boy.

It is also a good deal more frightening than the first film. The corridors, the voice in the walls and the spiders reach further into horror than Philosopher's Stone attempted, though the effect stays atmospheric rather than graphic.

Chris Columbus directs it without fuss, and John Williams's score, adapted and conducted by William Ross, does the quiet work of making the castle feel inhabited.

A 4, and BLAZING. The script is the loose part: a teacher nobody checks, a villain with no room to become one, a house-elf whose reasons arrive long after his actions. None of it costs the film much, because what surrounds it is three leads visibly becoming friends instead of being told they are, and comedy doing character work rather than filling space. Two decades on, it still plays.