Something wicked this way comes

Rating: 8/10 (20 January 2015)

For the third Harry Potter film, director Chris Columbus was replaced with Mexican Alfonso Cuarón, recently a double Academy Award winner for "Gravity". The film scored nominations for its score and visual effects with the Academy, but lost out as all the other Potter movies did. Personally, I would say that Azkaban is better than the second installment and worse than the first, but easily one of the three best movies from the whole series. It is also one of the most successful films at the box office from 2004. It starts again at Potter's home as a mean relative comes to visit his aunt and uncle, insults his parents and promptly gets turned into a balloon by Potter. The knight bus (nice wordplay) arrives right in time to save the boy from his raging relatives.
The action moves to Hogwarts and we find out that Hermione manages to visit courses simultaneously thanks to some time magic which becomes a crucial part of the film later on. Buckbeak and Hagrid make a nice couple as well, one of the highlights of the film. Malfoy gets into trouble as always and Harry ends up as the big hero again, sometimes a bit too heroic for my taste. Same can be said about the next movie afterward. The film has some humor again as do most of the others. We see Severus Snape in a Grandma's dress on one occasion. Looks like the new Defense-against-the-Dark-Arts (played by David Thewlis) teacher is quite a joker. I was not too impressed by the first hour of the film, but things get better quickly afterward. Also the snow at Hogwarts (snowball fight) and paper plane parts are nicely done. Trelawney (Emma Thompson), another teacher at Hogwarts, is really creepy during one scene, almost reminded me of a horror sequence from "The Exorcist". One of the sad highlights of the movie is Buckbeak's killing although it gets reversed and we don't even see it.
There were a couple negative points too, however. One would be how Harry all of a sudden uses magic against Snape when he encounters Oldman's character, who Harry thought would want to kill him. I found that whole scene pretty cringeworthy and illogical. And as I said earlier, I had some problems with the way Potter is always displayed like some huge powerful superhero. Radcliffe's mediocre acting doesn't help much. Michael Gambon takes over from hereon as Dumbledore for Richard Harris, who died before this was made. The film's biggest strength is possibly the ending. The last hour of the film is among the best the Potter franchise has to offer and all the little details about Harry and Hermione reliving the actual events are done with so much precision that I applaud the makers of this project, for example how he did see himself and not his dad. Only question I asked myself is why would he want to live with Oldman's character if he saw his dad who was supposedly alive (again)? But no more spoilers now. Just watch it yourself. You won't be disappointed.