A vast improvement on its predecessors

Rating: Null/10 (6 June 2004)

I've only read the book twice and it was quite a while ago, so many of the little details that they left out that so upset everyone else, I didn't even remember anyway. Fans had better get used to this - how else are they going to squash the 4 inch thick unedited tome of book 5 into less than 8 hours?
It's a much better film than the first two. Much, much better - it's shot with more style, better lighting, improved camera angles, some actual _direction_. It makes a huge difference to the appearance of the film, so that it doesn't look like your average Hollywood blockbuster.
The funny bits are funnier, the scary bits are scarier, and the actors actually do some of that acting stuff instead of their prior wooden performances. My largest complaint about the first two is that the child actors were doing appalling work, and their stiff and dull delivery of lines that came straight from the book made both films drag. Chopping out large chunks of dialogue has added much more fluidity to their acting and the end result is much more enjoyable to watch.
Hogwarts has never looked better - they've paid more attention to details so that the school appears much larger and more ancient. They've also moved some of the locations around, so Hagrid's hut, for example, is now at the bottom of an enormously steep hill. There is some poor CGI in it, but then werewolves are different things to different people and my own vision of a werewolf, for example, would just be a wolf, not a gangly man-thing with big teeth. That said, there's also some excellent CGI in it too - no more rubbery Quidditch scenes and Buckbeak is entirely believable as a completely CG character.
They didn't explain who Padfoot, Prongs, Wormtail and Moony were, but I don't think they really needed to because it didn't detract from the story. The book is a book for children so everything has to be hammered home, every loose end tied up, every detail explained.. film doesn't have to be like that, and so I'd be interested to know if anyone who hadn't read the book would pick up on all the hints that were left behind. They were all there, for anyone paying enough attention. I imagine the blow-by-blow explanation will be in the DVD.
Anyway - high spot for me was seeing Ian Brown (as in, the Stone Roses Ian Brown) stirring a cup of tea in the leaky cauldron.
I can only hope than Mike Newell does half as good a job on the Goblet of Fire.. and that we don't end up with Hugh Grant bumbling his way around Hogwarts.