Dazzling and Dramatic, Harry's Fifth Cinematic Adventure is Among His Best

Rating: 7/10 (11 February 2019)

The boy with the lightning-bolt scar and his playmates return to Hogwarts for a fifth term, having sprouted almost overnight into young adults. Daniel Radcliffe has undergone the most striking change, filling out his robes with broad shoulders and a strong jawline, which ties in well with his character's pubescent bouts of temper and gloom. As the kids have matured, so has the filmmaking. This entry continues the franchise's trend towards the serious, both in plot and technique. Harry learns more about his parents' personalities, realizes they may not have been the virtuous angels he once believed, launches a private rebellion against a strict new professor and investigates members of the opposite sex. The school grounds feel more ancient and formidable, the dialog less fluttering and whimsical, the action scenes far better realized. That last note has been a trouble spot for the series so far, as it's struggled to master believable special effects over the years. They've finally managed it this time: the large-scale wizarding battle at the end of the film is head and shoulders above anything we've seen so far.
Some knowledge of the books is a prerequisite - the opening scenes abruptly leap right into the action with little preamble, and the rush of new faces could be dizzying without some sort of primer - but that's nothing new, and I suppose one of the benefits of running such a lengthy series is that eventually we can do away with formalities and get right to the meat. Whittling down a nearly-900-page tome into roughly two hours of film does result in some exclusions: Ron and Hermione once again have very little to do, relegated to the background in many scenes, and several surviving subplots find themselves combined or streamlined for pacing reasons. That's understandable, something of a necessary evil for what's still, certainly, among the best efforts in the series. Things are starting to get interesting.