If you adore the books, you'll love seeing it all visualized and enjoy the dogged faithfulness of the films. If you don't love or aren't familiar with J.K. Rowling's wizardly output, you'll find the movies overlong and much magical ado about nothing.

It's all relative though. None of the Harry Potter movies are rubbish. Look at the dodgy ratio of good to bad Michael Crichton movies, all filmed with the speed of raptors after his Jurassic Park movie ruled the summer of 1993. Any film fans of Sphere, Congo, Disclosure, Rising Sun or The 13th Warrior out there?

Crichton's movie stinkers are actually minor league compared to the myriad of bad Stephen King adaptations, adapted and adopted by Hollywood from his Maine horror orphanage. Whilst most could name a handful of quality King movies (Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Dolores Claiborne), listing the fifty plus duff ones would take the remainder of this feature. Let's just leave it at The Lawnmower Man and Dreamcatcher.

So what to the future of book-to-film translations? Well, in the already released here but not yet in the US camp, the outstanding adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement could be a serious Oscar contender next year and give British cinema its biggest credibility boost in a long while.

By and large, studios don't like to take risks with their choice of novels to film. Occasionally you get wild, subversive novels like Trainspotting or Fight Club becoming perfectly formed, ground-breaking movies. Unfortunately, mass appeal will usually gain prominence over cult appeal.

Two of the most popular words over in Hollywood at the moment, though, are 'graphic' and 'novel', with the technology assisted success of Sin City and 300 bringing many of those supposedly un-filmable comic shop favourites to the masses, including the multi-layered masterpiece Watchmen (due 2009).

Personally, I'm still waiting for the big one, The Bible, last attempted by director John Huston in the Sixties.