In response to the previous post, I think Batman Returns is a masterpiece whereas '89 is forgettable and took away everything that made the Joker interesting.
As for Harry Potter, I think my opinion is actually quite unpopular in that I think the films got much worse as they went along. Columbus’s films were fantastic, Cuaron and Newell’s work was pretty good (although I do take issue with some changes Cuaron brought to the table and Yates took to the extreme), and the Yates films are a fucking embarrassment. Seriously, you can’t see shit, and the plots are sleep-inducing relative to what came before. Having not read the books, I don’t how much of that was down to Rowling and how much to Kloves and Goldenberg, but it lacked all the mystery and fantasy of earlier entries, settling for being just another YA trilogy, right down to splitting the last book in half.
Oh and the composers only accentuate this gradual downward spiral. We go from the living legend John Williams to bottom of the barrel composer Alexandre Desplat, with appropriately decent composers in between.
Yeah, you aren’t the first to tell me I’m wrong about those Batman films. To each their own, 'suppose.
And, is the general consensus that the Harry Potter films get better as they go along? I feel like the series peaked with Year 3 and was quite hit or miss after that point.
I think the first two were fairly decent kids movies, 3 was the one that was actually a very, very good film and the rest sort of meld together in my mind as either mostly forgettable or not very good at all. A huge problem I have is that the first 6 film are all primarily set in the same location of Hogwarts and that makes it very difficult to even remember which movies are which.