My favourite books never lived up to my expectations as films. Prisoner of Azkaban left out my favourite scenes and butchered my favourite character and Half Blood Prince was barely recognisable.
It's a toss-up between Order of the Phoenix and Philosopher's Stone. I'm going to have to go with the latter.
The characters look and behave more like I always imagined them, there's a real magic feel to it because, like the book, it focuses a lot on the idiosyncrasies of life at Hogwarts, and I think maybe because I was younger, it blew me away when I saw it on the big screen.
I also felt like this took a back seat and just let the story unfold whereas the other films, as the books become more developed and their plots more intricate, rushed a lot of the story and left out quirky scenes or treated minor characters to a token glimpse from the camera.
The Philosopher's Stone is the only one of the films that I felt had all the magic of the books. The Deathly Hallows Part 2 was also fantastic but I felt that it was a little too dark. The book also had a little dark humour that this film shied away from for obvious reasons. I cried for 70% of the film and though I left feeling it was one of the best films I had ever seen, I feel as though the first is still the best adaptation.
