The Movie: This is another DVD of a sequel that I am reviewing when I have not yet reviewed the original film in DVD format. I watched the original Harry Potter movie some time ago, and though I never had (and still haven't) read any of the books, I found it engaging and entertaining, so I eventually decided to give the first sequel a go.

The first thing that surprised me about this film happened when I just removed it from the Netflix envelope and read that it was 161 minutes long... good lord, did they actually keep the attentions of hundreds of children in movie theaters for 2 hours and 40 minutes with this thing? I guess I'd soon find out.

Though long, this film does seem to go by fairly quickly, though I was kind of shocked at just how intense some of the imagery got. I actually can't see why they'd give this film a PG rating while Men In Black II gets a PG-13 rating. I guess someone out there in the MPAA thinks that a couple of shots of a scantily clad woman are worse for children than graphic depictions of a kid vomiting giant slugs... and definitely a lot of younger children would be frightened by the rather dark images used throughout the film.

But I did still have fun, though I don't think I was quite as entertained as I was by the first one. The "I've already been introduced to this fantasy world once before" effect strikes again!

The DVD: Once again, this is a two disc set of which I only actually viewed the first disc. And there are two separate versions -- one in anamorphic widescreen, and the other in 4:3 done by the Super35 filming process. Make sure you get the one you want!

The anamorphic video seemed clean enough, but didn't have the best contrast I've ever seen, and actually exhibited a bit of murkiness in the shadows, and well, there are a whole lot of shadows in this film. The audio, however, was crisp and clean with plenty of surround effects to go with all of the magic and wizardry going on in the film.

As far as special features go, I didn't really check any of them out, but as a two disc set, I'm sure there's a ton of stuff there for everyone.