Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The second film of the series. Harry is on his summer holiday. A house elf arrives and warns him not to go back to school; unable to persuade him, it hides his letters and causes an accident at the house. Harry goes back anyway, this time in a flying car. Writing appears on a wall at school. A chamber has been opened and what is inside is loose. Students start being petrified. Nobody knows who is responsible and for a while suspicion piles onto Harry; it emerges that he can speak to snakes. From there the film is an investigation. A bathroom, a potion, a diary, a spiders' nest and a sink. The diary is at the centre. It answers what you write in it, and the person inside shows Harry a scene from the past. What the narrative is interested in is not the monster but descent: the real subject is whom you are descended from, and that the school runs on a hierarchy built on it. The insult from the book is used in the film and the narrative explains plainly what it means. There is a new teacher. Lockhart is a fraud and carries the comedy on his own. The tone is very close to the first film; bright, wide and aimed at children. The series starts darkening in the next one. It runs over two and a half hours, one of the longest in the series. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Isaacs, Richard Harris and Maggie Smith are in the cast. Chris Columbus directed; his second and last film in the series. Who it is for: anyone watching with children and following the series in order. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the narrative is long and the middle is slow.