A Delight for Fans of the Book

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2005)

"Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" is the most enjoyable and entertaining of the series so far.
Director Alfonso Cuarón and adapter Steven Kloves just assume we've read the books and seen the other movies so focuses on new main plot points with little time spent on explanations and side stories. So while this not a good entry point for neophytes, it's a barrel of laughs and excitement for fans.
The kid stars and co-stars are growing suitably along with the story line and I certainly hope they can continue with each movie, as their characters fit like gloves.
The adults continue to be a stellar representation of British talent, though they ham it up a bit too much, with the addition of David Thewlis as the first nice guy defense of the dark arts teacher who surprisingly could have seemed a bit more tormented about his monthly problem, Emma Thompson playing the clairvoyant as just plain batty, Michael Gambon a bit too twinkly in replacing Richard Harris as Dumbledore, and Timothy Spall literally as a rat.
The very long, and visually delightful, closing credits show the extent of the special effects, but we do see them all on the screen. Well, not all the long list of accountants and the masseur.
And they needed Cynthia Weil to come up with song lyrics that are taken straight from the witches of "MacBeth"?
As it was a few weeks until my family could get organized to see it, the print we saw was pale and had poor sound, which made the noisy and noting-the-obvious all-ages audience particularly distracting. Though at the end of the 141 minutes, the kid in back of me (and inside of me, too) protested to his parents: "That wasn't long!"
(originally written 7/6/2004)