My husband and I watched The Golden Compass last weekend. Disclaimer: I'm not a scholar of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. I read The Golden Compass and liked it well enough; I started The Subtle Knife and abandoned it (if I recall correctly, its agenda was too obvious); I never bothered with The Amber Spyglass. I didn't have high expectations for the movie version of Compass, either, all of which may explain why I liked it as much as I did (and more than the first Narnia movie). I'm actually disappointed that the sequels to the movie will probably never be made.

Here's what I liked:

The casting. Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra and Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter were perfect, as was Sam Elliot as Lee Scoresby.
The concept of daemons. This is what I remembered best from the book. In case you haven't read it, or seen the movie, your daemon is an animal manifestation of your soul (there's more, obviously, but that'll do). I spent the first part of the movie deciding what I would like my daemon to be, and had just settled on a hare when Lee Scoresby showed up with Hester. What would your daemon be?
The panserbjorne. I'm not ordinarily a fan of CGI animals, especially ones that talk, but I liked the armored bears, too. I do wish we could have seen Iorek Byrnison making his own armor, or at least putting it on: I'm always interested in how people (and polar bears, apparently) dress their parts.
Lyra's knit cap. If the knitwear in this movie doesn't inspire me to learn to knit (preferably by Christmas), then nothing will. There's even a pattern available here.

Have you seen it yet?