The fact that Yates marshals a mile-long grocery list of business with the grace and poise of an orchestra conductor, and makes it look easy, isn’t just flattery, it’s an indication of his method.

Essential to understanding the magnitude of Yates’s achievement is to deliver him from the lukewarm deathblow of “workmanlike,” which is perfectly appropriate for Mike Newell’s turn at bat, and far too kind to the toxic Chris Columbus. If that’s a little too egghead-cinephile for you folks, bear with me. As a firestorm rages through a seemingly infinite attic space, Yates’s camera (presided over by Eduardo Serra, who lensed seven of Claude Chabrol’s last eight feature films) circumscribes enough screen space to anchor the chaos to a stabilizing, grounded structure with reassuring x-y axes, giving the viewer the pleasure both of frantic motion and its container.

As the director himself has evolved from an efficient and vaguely stylish, yet unsure, functionary into the greatest director of blockbuster cinema since Steven Spielberg, the sense of unhurried, supple balance rarely departs from even the busiest, most deafening, most f/x-laden sequences. The Harry Potter franchise’s winding-down films, all four directed by David Yates, rely heavily on such calm-before-the-storm moments as the hour of Voldemort’s inevitable defeat draws nigh. After a perfunctory couple of shots lifted from the end of the first installment of The Deathly Hallows, the film begins in earnest with a scene of slow, quiet urgency at an oceanfront cottage that could have been imported from Jacques Rivette’s Out 1.

Harry potter and the deathly hallows ii