The darkest Harry Potter till the next darkest Harry Potter!

Rating: 1/10 (15 February 2006)

Yes, this is the darkest Harry Potter yet. My goodness is it dark. Therefore it must be very, very good.
And then after all the reptilian satanic horror has been seared into the minds of the youthful audience, there he is again - DumbleBore - the most tedious old fraud in a cinematic series ever, wheeled on to give some more of his bogus moral justification for what has just preceded. You know the sort of stuff: ''Not even the most Powerful and Evil Magician in the World can defeat a Mother's Love' (eh, why not? I thought he was the most Powerful and Evil Magician in the World, etc) The 'kids' are now reaching adolescence and so are sloppy, charmless, foul mouthed  but they still can't act. In one scene, the guesting Bulgarian Cup team come marching into the hall, tight formation, disciplined action  in reality they would have slaughtered our sloppy Brits in the tournament, and perhaps that would have made a better picture.
Ah well. I really did like the last Potter though, even though they are all the same formula  that had a foreign Director who was obviously a Craftsman and an Artist, and it had a script that didn't seem like it was trying to cram an entire ludicrously unedited novel into a limited running time.
Probably the trouble with this entry it is that it is the first in the series directed by an Englishman, and in that chippy way English artists of whatever stripe have, he most likely wanted to eliminate anything in the content that might be construed as simultaneously Charming and English.