Harry Potter lives to see another day. The Hogwarts wizard has made his stage debut in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play that pushes JK Rowling’s world-beating franchise beyond the realm of fiction and film to embrace live action: the bespectacled boy has become an angsty grown-up, and London theatre is much the richer for it.

Richard Griffiths, who has died at the age of 65 from complications during heart surgery, will be remembered above all for three performances, two on screen and one onstage. In Withnail & I (1987), he embodied in Uncle Monty a predatory homosexual who, according to the film’s director Bruce Robinson, was based on Franco Zeffirelli. Many years later Griffiths found himself playing a character parked on the same spectrum in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2005).

Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature.

Over the year we have reviewed many a new film and television drama in theartsdesk's Disc of the Day slot. As our series of DVD recommendations comes round to the movies, we have chosen to concentrate not on individual titles but box sets. For completists we suggest everything from Harry Potter to Ken Loach, The Avengers to Tarkovsky. If you want more Chaplin or Eisenstein in your life, here, too, is a good place to start. These collections and collations are a worthwhile investment for serious and playful fans of film and drama alike.

Hollywood has turned the special effect into a birthright for a generation of movie-goers. “How did they do that?” is no longer a question you hear in the multiplex. In the theatre it’s another thing entirely. Whatever the reception for the show in its entirety, the musical version of The Lord of the Rings did contain one remarkable illusion in which Bilbo Baggins vanished before the audience’s eyes. Even Derren Brown had no idea how it was achieved. The architect of that effect, and countless others in a long career in the theatre, was Paul Kieve.

So. That’s it then. It’s taken just shy of 20 hours to work through the lot, a gestation spread across a decade. Every British actor in the firmament has visited the Leavesden set to chew on some of the computer-generated furniture. Several trillion techie hours have been racked up on achieving SFX which wouldn’t have been even a twinkle in a geek’s eye when JK Rowling first conceived the seven-part tale of a boy wizard. And a trio of young actors cast before puberty have missed out on a decade’s worth of regular schooling.

That’s the question New York theatre folk are asking this morning, following the announcement of the 2011 Tony nominations, honouring the best of the Broadway theatre season just gone. Radcliffe was thought to be a dead cert for a nomination for his performance as the careerist window washer in the smash-hit revival of Frank Loesser’s How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. And there were many who thought Radcliffe would go on to win the trophy on 12  June, just as another visiting British film star, Catherine Zeta-Jones, did for her Broadway musical theatre debut in A Little Night Music last year.

Harry Potter has devoured entire childhoods, swallowed adolescences whole. Not to mention swathes of many a middle age. There are those of us who have read all 2,765,421 words (I checked) of the seven-part saga out loud to their children. Adults who would sooner use diminishing brain-cell capacity to store more pertinent information can tell you who teaches Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, the uses of gillyweed and the difference between a grindylow and a blast-ended skrewt.

There’s always the risk, when you put a tape machine in front of Michael Gambon (b. 1940), that it won’t be recording the truth and nothing but. His taste for mischief-making is legendary, his low boredom threshold a matter of fact. It doesn’t take a shrink to come up with an explanation. Film parts may take come thick and fast these days, not least in the interminable Harry Potter franchise, but Gambon loves a live audience.

 There's a strong distaff presence in theartsdesk's third DVD round-up. The headline film is Kathryn Bigelow's superb war thrillerThe Hurt Locker, currently mopping up awards in the US and a hot favourite for the Oscars. Also in the mix: Audrey Tautou as the redoubtable doyenne of French fashion in Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel and Julie Christie in Sally Potter's avant-garde 1983 debut feature The Gold Diggers. Fear not, however: a robust testosterone level is maintained by Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, by the hit stag-party comedy The Hangover and by Antichrist, Lars von Trier's "misogynist" (according to some) psychodrama. Harry Potter is the star of our box set of the month. The selection was made by Anne Billson, Ryan Gilbey, Sheila Johnston and Jasper Rees.