The King's Speech

Though it features the sort of rousing, uplifting score one expects for a movie about an underdog overcoming an obstacle, the dominant sonic motif in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is a light, choked gargle, the sound of the base of the tongue splashing around the back of the throat in tremulous preparation for a performance it would like nothing more than to not give. The tongue in question belongs to Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York and second in line of succession to the king of England, a man whose stammer might never had been an issue were he blessed with the good fortune to have been born before the popularization of radio.

The film opens in 1925, at the closing of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Albert's father, King George V (Michael Gambon), charges him with delivering the closing speech on radio, himself and the primary heir to the throne, Prince Edward, having already made their wireless debuts. As he arrives, his wife and their confidants reassure Albert that he will do wonderfully, but the look of fear in his eyes creates a tense mood before he even says a word. At last, aides send him in front of the microphone at the head of the stands, and all in the audience turn reverently to hear him. The pause is deafening, and when Albert finally speaks, the crackled stutters that escape his lips echo through the sound system, mocking him as the crowd maintains their respectful silence but look around uncomfortably in that way people need to make eye contact to share pain but must also avoid it at all costs to prevent an errant titter.

It's an excruciating moment, and as someone who does not stammer but has often felt the hot sting of apprehension -- no, pure, unrelenting terror -- at the simple notion of public speaking, the seemingly contradictory combination of agoraphobia and claustrophobia that creeps into the mise-en-scène rang painfully true. Of course, the damned thing about a stammer or any other display of anxiety is that, once aware that others have picked up on the trait, the sufferer can never right, spiraling further into a pit of self-revulsion and embarrassment that magnifies the first slip into a cascade of tics and halting pronunciation. The first scared pause, the dreaded "ums" and "likes," never come in one aberration. They only ever lead to more mistakes.

Humiliated by the experience, Albert tries a series of speech therapists, all of whom display a knowledge of medicine so arcane one expects them to break out leeches and suggest a blood-letting. As ashamed by the experiences of failing with countless doctors as the public performances themselves, Albert swears off speech therapy and banks on a public life held largely out of view as his father and elder brother can handle the speeches. But the king knows better. He realizes that an occasional appearance in procession with a regal wave will no longer do; with every household turning to radio for news, entertainment, and general social guidance, it is imperative that the royal family take advantage of the airwaves lest they become an inanimate relic alongside the other trinkets in their castles for fat American tourists to come marvel at year after year. "We've been reduced to the most vile and loathsome profession of all: actors," sighs the king with grim irony.

Behind Albert's back, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), finds a middle-class therapist, one Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Whatever danger this movie was in of being a stuffy period drama is obliterated by Rush's entrance, heralded by a toilet flush before that magnificent mass of a head enters the frame and, unaware of who Elizabeth really is, makes plain, frank chat with her. His puckish grin, mischievous bow tie (and since when has a bow tie been mischievous?) and quick wit disarm the somber proceedings instantly, though it's just as amusing to see his boyish looks blanch when his upfront candor is returned in kind and Elizabeth reveals her identity and that of her husband.

The scenes between Lionel and Albert -- or Bertie, as his family (and Lionel, to his extreme annoyance) call him -- play as a tug-of-war between stale, Academy-pleasing montage of uplift and determination and something fresher, more spontaneous. Lionel insists on a first-name basis to make his therapy work, and his direct manner so stuns the royal member used to even his closest advisers speaking to him with reverence and cowed expression that he starts answering back in spite of himself. Rush's humor is infectious; Bertie tells him about the other doctors who prescribed cigarettes to relax the lungs, to which Lionel replies, "They're idiots." "They're all knighted," replies Bertie smugly. "That makes it official, then," says Lionel with a wide grin.

Rush and Firth attain an instant chemistry that shows off each individually but also creates a certain hollowness when they're apart. Rush, with his giant, triangular face, is at once boyish and refined, his elocution and perfect diction clashing with his more laid-back attitude. He plays off Firth, who once again gives a fantastic performance. Like Tilda Swinton, Firth is seemingly incapable of giving anything less than a mesmerizing performance, and he's the sort of person who can oscillate between homely and strikingly beautiful depending on they compose themselves. Firth spends most of the film contorted in mental agony, squashing his throat into a makeshift double chin as if compressing a bellow, hoping to stoke the words out of his lungs. He looks uncomfortable with the very thought of existence, his eyes darting nervously even when secluded from the public eye.

Had Hooper the confidence to stay entirely with their interplay, The King's Speech might have deserved the fevered hype that has greeted its release. But he gets mired in the cliché of the genre. His edits border on the sporadic at times, eliding over the more intimate and affecting moments to get to necessary stopgaps in plot. Bound to tell the historical narrative, Hooper must devote time to Prince Edward, a feckless, irresolute cad governed by his emotions, all of which are petulant and self-centered. Casting Guy Pearce in the role makes all the Australian jokes lobbed at Lionel throughout the film that much more amusing, but not even Pearce can work with the weakling. Nothing exposes the ludicrous nature of the monarchy like Edward's ascension and ultimate abdication of the throne: he falls in love with an American woman working on her second divorce, and his passions lead him to propose marriage. As the head of the Church of England, the king could not marry a divorcée, and what's more, neither the characters nor the people behind the camera suggest his rashness comes from true love. And so, Edward drains the film's middle section, simply occupying time until he can at last drop out and let his younger brother assume the throne.

Furthermore, Hooper and writer David Seidler get stuck with the proposition of successfully building dramatic tension to the titular speech, delivered when Britain declared war on Germany. Though Lionel features prominently and the camera spends some time in his modest domicile, this is a film that essentially roots itself in the hermetically sealed world of the monarchy, a faded, anachronistic relic that effectually ended long before the Russian tsars and German emperors mentioned nervously as Albert and others ponder the fate of the dynasty. But this creates the issues of building social tension through the group of people most oblivious to popular malaise and the nuances of international relations. After all, this monarchy sent its subjects to die en masse in the previous Great War even though they, being of inbred "pure" stock, were related to the German nobility they were meant to be opposing. The film wouldn't work if it suddenly sprang WWII on the audience without tying Albert's story to the mounting international turbulence, but it also seems clumsy for the characters to mention him only in the most terse and suggestive way possible, as they do throughout the 30s before Albert becomes George VI. Only when war is at England's doorsteps do the references to "Herr Hitler" becomes anything less than thudding moments of forced relevance in an otherwise sharp script.

The film has its other flaws. For the note-perfect work from the main cast, some of the supporting parts, though played by heavyweights border on the laughable. Timothy Spall, my dear Timothy, puts in such a bad Churchill impersonation I kept waiting for, Monty Python-style, someone to walk in from behind the camera and say, "No, stop, this has gotten far too silly." Derek Jacobi plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the more morally superior to hold the position, as an unctuous but snippy sycophant, wanting to be villainous without being able to twist the real man that far without snapping him from his base in reality. Long after Hooper's direction settles into its refined grace and settles the aesthetic issues near the start, these two drag down all of their scenes. Taken with some of the more obvious lines, these nagging issues too often distract from the keen, hilarious and moving double act shared by Rush and Firth and expertly moderated by Carter.

Yet if The King's Speech is ultimately unable to transcend the restrictive boundaries of its awards-baiting genre, it overcomes any disappointment by being so full of verve and energy that it at least stretches those confines to the breaking point. This is the kind of film made to show off its actors, but the main players are all so excellent that they would all deserve awards, were they given based on merit instead of marketing ability. Fortunately for the cast and crew, The King's Speech has enjoyed plenty of that as well. I do not think the term "Oscar-bait" necessarily connotes a bad film, but it does speak to the increasingly stale formula guaranteed to please the artistically conservative members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. What typically makes an Oscar-bait film unbearable is when it was clearly made to reap platitudes.

The King's Speech works because it cares for its characters and understands the symbolic but vital importance of George VI. A whole other movie could be made about the courage he and his wife displayed during the war, never leaving London even when a bomb went off at Buckingham Palace. The pauses he put into his speeches as he ensured each word came out clearly gave his voice a solemn gravity, and though his inspiration gets overlooked in favor of Churchill, George too played a key role in the war effort. Rush's Lionel looks compassionately but sternly upon his subject, aware that Albert could be a great man if he could only get over his fears. It is a testament to how well Rush goads Albert and how well Firth responds that, when the speech came at last, though I knew the ending, a tiny knot had formed in my stomach. Whatever else holds back the film, that effect was earned, and this break from the usual, priggish nature of period drama made The King's Speech an unexpected pleasure to watch.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson is one of a handful of interesting, unique directors working in America today whose work is marginalized by that most useless of criticisms: that he is a "style over substance" filmmaker. I don't know when bringing something visual to the most visually stimulating of all media became something worthy of derision but, while sometimes the phrase is used appropriately, those who casually toss it out at any film that dares look interesting should be forced to sit through a Dogme 95 marathon so they can appreciate what aesthetic means to a film's enjoyment and how fucking terrible movies are without it. Having said that, I'm far from the world's biggest Wes Anderson fan, having previously loved on The Royal Tenenbaums and found the rest of his oeuvre, even Rushmore, to be excellent in places and spotty in others. His last two features, the soulless Life Aquatic and the on-the-nose Darjeeling Limited, were neither outright bad, but for all of Life Aquatic's insanity and Darjeeling's back-to-basics vibrancy, I found little in either worth remembering; neither was an exercise in style over substance, but the substance communicated through their styles held no interest for me.

It is with some trepidation, then, that I admit how much I enjoyed his latest work, Fantastic Mr. Fox, as it might seem that I'm choosing a simple kid's film over his more complex works. Well, yes, this is a kid's film, as straightforward as entries in the genre must be, but it also delves into the key theme of Anderson's corpus: a dysfunctional, emotionally distant family and the extent its members will go to for each other. He does not so much gut Roald Dahl's story as stuff every crevice with his own sensibilities, stretching Dahl's whimsical story into a post-ironic bit of family fun, appealing to your 5-year-old and your embittered hipster teenager.

His Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is an egotistical chicken thief, so full of himself that he even acknowledges it at one point. His wife Felicity (Meryl Streep), forces him to give up his trade when the two narrowly escape death in one engagement and she reveals her pregnancy. 12 fox-years later, Mr. Fox writes opinion columns for the local paper that no one reads and has an uneasy relationship with his son Ash (Jason Schwartzman), a barely held-together wad of fur and rage. Fox hates his gray flannel suit existence and longs for the fire of his youth, so he moves his family out of the ground and into a tree, ostensibly for the freedom of sunshine but in reality for the new home's proximity to three farms owned by Boggis, Bunce and Bean and their irresistible products within.

The world that Anderson and his animators created for Mr. Fox and the other characters to roam has a pop-up book quality, evidently something artificial yet something you want to reach out and feel anyway. When the camera moves, it typically does so sideways, moving through rooms and layers in the inventive underground world of the animals as if scanning the panels of a comic book. Each of these areas, and the characters who inhabit them, bursts with Anderson's visual acumen: overwhelmingly bright colors, right-angle arrangements, symmetry. Anderson is a director both praised and criticized for his meticulous compositions, so what better medium for him to explore than stop-motion animation, the most involving method of building and photographing a world from scratch?

I'm tip-toeing around discussing the film as, pound for pound, this is the funniest picture in Anderson's canon. It's always tricky when a filmmaker or actor moves from working primarily in the R-rated field to children's entertainment -- how cringeworthy it is when the subject of "making the kids proud of me" raises its serpentine head in interviews -- but Anderson tackles the shift with extra cheek; how many PG films (PG only because some of the characters, as they must in an Anderson movie, smoke) not only broach the subject of existentialism but say the word aloud? The director also replaces every possible swear word with the word "cuss," and I suspect that he wrote the script without children in mind and censored himself later, because the word is bandied about quite often, including as a part of combinations such as "clustercuss." I'd like to see this method used on TV instead of the annoying and useless bleeping that grates the ears.

The Darjeeling Limited had its moments of character insight, but Fantastic Mr. Fox gets Anderson back on firm emotional ground. Mr. Fox's ennui is deeply felt (and his comments on the non-readership of his column is a subtle commentary, perhaps, on our own failing papers), and the caustic relationship between Ash, who projects his insecurities and self-loathing outward, and essentially everyone else is as revealing of his inner concerns as it is blisteringly funny. His exchanges with cousin Kristofferson in particular are ripe for comedy, as Kristofferson is everything that Ash isn't: athletic, handsome and, it seems, well-liked by Mr. Fox. These meaty lead performances are bolstered by a manic cast of supporters voiced by the likes of Anderson alumni Owen Wilson and Bill Murray, all of whom find that usual balance between the goofier aspects of the directors characters and their reserved, ultra-dry style.

However, a few items stuck in my craw after leaving the theater, and I still can't get over some of Anderson's choices after sleeping on my thoughts. Mr. Fox, Ash, Kristofferson, the opossum Kylie, they're all so much fun; so why are all the female characters uptight and as flat as Anderson's storybook compositions? I understand that the director is evoking a bit of a '50s suburban feel with the layouts of the animals' houses, but why did he feel the need to port over the vision of the domesticated housewife as well? Felicity knows that her husband resumed thieving upon moving near the farms, she only offers a few words of stern caution to try to stop him. When Mr. Fox places the entire community in peril by angering the farmers, Felicity only gets to run through one of those "Oh, I love you but you can be so silly sometimes!" harsh speeches that isn't so harsh. Speaking of the farmers: why are all the humans voiced by British and Irish actors when all of the animals are voiced by American ones? Yes, the composition of the farms brings to mind the English countryside where Dahl set the story, but there's no explanation for the clear difference. Perhaps it's a further distinction between animals and humans, but considering that the two groups can understand and converse with one another, it just seems like a lazy excuse for Anderson to use some actors he liked. And I don't even know what the hell Willem Dafoe thought he was doing as an evil rat who sounds as though he came from New Orleans, though I admit I liked his mix of zaniness and menace.

Nevertheless, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a terrific return to form for Anderson, lacking the depth of his best work but making up for it with his first film to allow you to sit back and enjoy the visuals without having to worry about the story's complexity whacking you in the head every five minutes. And when I said that this was as much for the kids as the indie crowd, I meant it: yes, no child will catch the extended reference to The Third Man of a sequence in sewers, and they'll likely not catch the potential nod to Toy Story in the form of a milk (or apple, as the case may be) crate prison. But they'll have as much fun with its irreverence as adults, perhaps more so -- I was turned on to Monty Python at 10 and my parents still don't see its appeal, and they grew up in the proper time period for it. Anderson's humor may be smug, but he derives laughs directly from how smug the characters are, and nobody can spot a phony and laugh at him like a child.

1989 Rewind: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Films concerning food, or featuring food prominently in certain sections, typically work up an appetite in their audiences. Eat Drink Man Woman, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, hell, even Ratatouille have me jotting down plans for what to buy at the store or what type of restaurant I'm going before I'm done watching them. Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover takes place almost exclusively in a restaurant, where the chef is such a master that he toils over the artistic presentation of the food as much as its taste. However, anyone who could come away from Greenaway's picture looking forward to any sort of meal has any iron constitution to be feared and respected.

I'll give Greenaway this: he doesn't pussyfoot around. In the opening scene, the Thief, a gangster named Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) has a man stripped and covered in dog feces to teach him a lesson about making his payments on time. Spica somehow secured himself ownership of a gourmet restaurant, and he believes that by eating there every night he can slip into the upper class by way of imitation. But his boorish behavior, as well as that of his crass crew, belies his hysterically transparent aspirations of social advancement, and Greenaway juxtaposes him with the genuine class and composure of the Wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren). Georgina is detached and bored, though one suspects her seeming patience comes not from being aloof but for catching a beating whenever she dares question her lout of a husband.

As Spica and his gang drive customers away in droves with their behavior, Georgina suffers in silence, until she spots a quiet man reading a book across the dining room. The two engage in an affair without even speaking to one another, making love under Albert's nose and very nearly being caught several times. Though they initially make no emotional connection through words, we can sense what the two see in each other: Georgina finds someone with her dignity and carriage, a gentle soul who gives her comfort in sex. The lover, Michael (Alan Howard), an intellectual bookshop owner who finds the idea of a woman sitting so quietly by such an ogre so interesting that he's drawn to her sexually. After days of engaging in secret sex -- which the Cook (Richard Bohringer) knows about but never remarks upon -- the couple finally gets to properly introduce themselves when Albert notices Michael reading at his usual table and invites -- in his own way -- the man to come to his own table and meet his wife.

The story between the four forms a Rabelaisian view of Thatcherian England. Every night, the same group of thugs comes to terrorize the employees and patrons of the restaurant, and even those of us who don't treat ourselves to the fancier side of cuisine can tell that the massive, ostentatious dishes served to the table are unappealing and serve only to fill a fat stomach (one suspects this is the kitchen's form of rebellion against its new, oppressive, know-nothing overlord). Albert gives the cook, the man he beat and smeared at the start, two trucks filled with meat, but the bitter chef refuses them. So, they stay behind the restaurant, their contents rotting until authorities at last come because the stench is overpowering [as a side note, I wonder if the images of the rotting meat, possibly the most shocking sight in a film that truly gives you your pick of the litter, are a reference to the symbolic rotting food in Roman Polanski's Repulsion; both mark the passage of time as well as the mounting of chaos]. It's a picture of the sickening excess and waste and greed of Thatcher's politics, presented to us with images that become progressively more shocking as the true depths of Albert's mania manifest themselves.

Greenaway is first and foremost a painter, having originally applied to the Walthamstow College of Art with the intent of becoming a muralist, and the influence of art on his film is evident even in its title. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Like the title of a painting, it flatly describes what's in it, but not what it means, what these characters do, how they think, what they represent. The way that Greenaway uses and frames these characters certainly makes use of his artistic knowledge as well, though I confess my shameful lack of knowledge with nearly anything to do with art precludes me from speculating on his influences. If you do know your stuff and/or are simply curious, you can find a marvelous analysis here. However, I can readily see a connection between Greenaway and another artist-cum-director, David Lynch. Greenaway's use of lighting and color recalls Lynch's contemporary, more mainstream artistic usage of color and lighting to evoke moods and ratchet tension (though this film features an astonishing score courtesy of Michael Nyman, supposedly the man who coined the term "minimalism"): occasionally, he floods the screen with so much red light that distinguishing between objects is nearly impossible, as if the frame of a Bergman red fade got stuck in the middle of the fade-out.

One could also draw parallels between Greenaway and Stanley Kubrick. Both have a commanding vision and a keen understanding of cinematography, art design and acting, but they also have a similar sense of detached satire. In 2001, Kubrick defined humanity by our tools, the objects that strip us of our humanity by doing all of our jobs for us. Greenaway's script certainly has moments of dark hilarity, particularly some marvelously foreshadowing -- when Albert learns of the affair, he says he'll kill Michael and eat him, and Georgina asks Michael why he keeps so many books, saying at one point that he can't eat them -- but Greenaway's vision is considerably darker even than the outpourings of Kubrick's twisted mind. Comedian Bill Hicks once fatalistically said, in response to the notion of the beauty of mankind, "We're a virus with shoes." Greenaway largely follows that line of logic for his film: he films so many disgusting scenes of scatological, sexual and violent content to break us down to our essences. He seems to be saying that humans are nothing more than urine, crap, bile, blood and whatever other juices and fluids our bodies secrete.

That anti-humanist sentiment might explain why the actual restaurant draws our attention as much, if not more, than the characters. Each area of La Hollondais has its own specific color scheme: the exterior, where Albert first exercises his wrath and where the meat rots slowly, is dark blue and foreboding. The dining hall, where Albert makes a pig of himself and frequently explodes, is red. The kitchen is a faint green, cooler and more inviting but also faintly sickly. Interestingly, the physical properties of the kitchen warp depending on the overall mood of the concurrent events: at times it is a model of order and cleanliness, a kitchen worthy of a five star restaurant. At others, however, it is a dank, festering display of medieval barbarism choked with great slabs of uncleaned food, with fetid steam rising everywhere as if the place were built upon a giant manhole. Hilariously, the bathroom, a place where one deposits human waste and where Georgina and Michael engage in adulterous sex, is virgin white. One could easily read from the color scheme that the lovers' actions are not sinful because they find respite and joy in one another, but it also clues us into to the director's unflappability concerning our bowel movements and an acknowledgment that they are not dirty because they are a biological necessity.

Having watched The Informers recently, I was struck by the similarity between Greenaway's vision of a society choking itself on excess and the work of Bret Easton Ellis. But Greenaway sets himself apart from Ellis' literary output with a sense of artistry and a firm grasp of satire that Ellis never had, and cinematically no one, not even Christian Bale with his Patrick Bateman, has come within a league of Michael Gambon's terrifying performance as Albert; Albert is so utterly vile that even I, a professed cynic, psychologically could not see him live. He's the sort of character who, if he escaped the movie unpunished, would inspire you to go straight to the top and demand your money back from Greenaway himself. One must also note Helen Mirren's fearless performance, bottling her character's fear until it creates tension simply by manifesting itself, not to mention the bravery of spending so much time nude on a set (Howard also deserves kudos for this).

A number of reviews have agreed, some of them verbatim, that the characters each symbolize a certain aspect of late-'80s England: the Thief stands for Thatcher, her arrogance and her policies that supported mass greed; the Cook is a dutiful laborer who does as he told but grumbles privately against his master; the Lover is the liberal intellectual railing against Thatcher's policies. The Wife, of course, is Britain, who is shackled to the Thief and suffers his abuse, but ultimately triumphs and slays the beast. Who would have guessed that a film featuring excrement, a stabbing, several scenes of torture, a grisly murder and cannibalism could end on an optimistic note?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

After running through my marathon viewing of the previous five installments of the Harry Potter franchise in the last two days, I've come to a simple realization: as a whole, the series is frustratingly average. For a series set in a magical alternate world tucked away from our weary doldrums, it never conveys any sense of the wonder of J.K. Rowling's mad creation. Even as the series grew darker with each sequel, half the fun of reading them was exploring new places and oddball characters, which gave them an unassailable joyousness no matter how bleak the outcome looked for our heroes.

Not that Harry is feeling particularly cheery at the start of Half-Blood Prince. Now exonerated in the court of public opinion following proof of Voldemort's return, Harry must endure press junkets mere minutes after watching his godfather Sirius die. This devastating moment rarely has any impact on the story at all, however, perhaps because the last film failed to wring much emotion out of it. Dumbledore whisks him away, and soon he plucks Harry from his summer break begin the hunt for their nemesis.

Michael Gambon has been a treat ever since he took over for the late, great Richard Harris in the third film, but he brings his A-game this time, mixing regret, quiet strength and subtle humor effortlessly. He holds the entire film together as he takes Harry on strolls through a magical Memory Lane to trace Voldemort's history.

The first act of the film is perhaps the best stretch of the film series: it captures the darkness of the novel, and Yates' direction is sturdy and evocative. Harry's trips with Dumbledore and the Pensieve scene involving a young Tom Riddle (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, nephew of Ralph Fiennes, Voldemort himself) are deeply and wonderfully unsettling, and I caught myself tensing up at times. A note, though: when Death Eaters fly through London and destroy a crowded Muggle bridge, the effect is somewhat spoiled when the camera zooms out from people frantically running to see the bridge twisting...without a soul standing on it. That's pretty basic animation, guys.

Then we start following our beloved trio through the school year, and Half-Blood Prince loses its way. Yates and writer Steve Kloves suddenly drop the dark air of the first act in favor of a protracted inspection of the romantic woes of all three. Ron and Hermione's attempts to woo the other only drive them further apart, while Harry apparently has to queue up for a crack at Ron's little sis Ginny (Bonnie Wright). These slightly comical interactions throw off the pacing and greatly distract from the mission at hand. I've read a number of reviews claiming that this movie works because it shows the characters maturing like normal teenagers despite the predicament surrounding them, but Kloves only explores this aging through unfunny comic relief.

There is one moment, when Hermione sits dejected as Ron snogs a clingy devotee and asks how Harry feels when he sees other boys with Ginny. As Ron walks past with his facesucking buddy in tow, Harry nearly whispers, "It feels like that." That one line is achingly beautiful, and more lines like that would have made the distraction from the Voldemort story because it genuinely would have fleshed these characters out. But no, that line is sadly just a fluke. Why Yates decided to stick with these subplots at the expense of the excellent Voldemort history lesson is beyond me.

Furthermore, the final battle in Hogwarts has been drastically altered and excised, and Yates took the emotional weight of the scene along with it. When the identity of the Half-Blood Prince is revealed, it's already been softened by a scene cut and pasted from the seventh book that openly hints at the true nature behind the final tragedy. And for all the planning the Death Eaters put into breaking into Hogwarts, they seem to stroll out as quickly as they enter, leaving only a single vandalized room in their wake. Imagine if Robert De Niro's character spent all of Heat planning, only to walk into the bank at the end and make a deposit.

On the positive side, the acting is up to the usual standards. Radcliffe may never be convincing as a reluctant, angsty leader (or even one of the three), and Watson still over-pronounces each line, but the others are great. Poor Rupert Grint has always made the best of a bad situation with the under-written Ron -- heck, when the fame-whore Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) never remembers his name, I felt he did so not because the Weasleys are ordinary wizards but because even I know nothing about him at this point of the film franchise -- but he gets some big laughs with his dopey grin and his constant bemusement. Both Fiennes-Tiffin and Frank Dillane (who plays the teen Riddle) are pitch-perfect in their roles, and Dillane in particular makes me wish far more of the film had been devoted to him working his icy charm on unsuspecting adults.

However, it's Tom Felton, the best of the child actors since the first film, who steals the show as the hardened yet tortured Draco. He's always had that haughty sneer down pat, but we see another side of him in this film, and he outperforms even the adults. If only Yates had stopped replaying the scene of him ripping the curtain off of a magic cabinet over and over and used that time to let Felton do something else, because I believed every choice Draco made in this movie, even more so than I did in he books.

All in all, Half-Blood Prince, like all of its predecessors save Prisoner of Azkaban, has excellent moments but fails to add up into a cohesive whole. Its omissions and alterations result in an enjoyable movie, but one that builds to a climax that never comes. As with "Order of the Phoenix," it takes an emotionally charged ending and mishandles it to the point of tedium. And for the love of God, will they give Alan Rickman something to do before this series ends?

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

While I disliked the omissions and alterations of Prisoner of Azkaban when I first saw it, revisiting it after aging enough to distance myself from a rabid love of the books allowed me to appreciate it for the artistic triumph that it is. It's still got its fair share of weaknesses, but the character moments and stylistic feel made it far more interesting than the previous films combined. I noted with a certain sense of regret and resignation that Steve Kloves once again penned the screenplay for this next sequel, but Azkaban was a step up, so anything's possible, right?

To my surprise, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is almost as good as Prisoner of Azkaban, and sometimes a bit better. Cuaròn's direction hinted at an Expressionist influence, which the latest director, Mike Newell, mixes with the action movie vibe of the Triwizard challenges and really plays up in the final act, in which the film becomes a true horror film, albeit one softened to appeal to the young demographic. Mad-Eye Moody himself looks like he tumbled out of a Fritz Lang movie, while Hogwarts' juxtaposition o cluttered, maze-like halls and the quiet terrain that engulfs its exterior continues to cast a sense of foreboding.

Harry finds himself in the Triwizard tournament, which is only open to 17-year-olds, when his name somehow appears in the titular goblet, which announces the names of the champions representing each of the three schools involved: Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poesy) for Beauxbatons, star Quidditch player Viktor Krum (Stanislav Ianevski) for Durmstrang and Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson) for Hogwarts. Understandably, these rightful contestants and their headmasters are a bit miffed to discover that Hogwarts has two shots at glory and that such a young boy (the biggest celebrity in their world, no less) should steal the spotlight from them. Harry is simply terrified.

Aiding him in preparing for these tasks, naturally, are Ron and Hermione, who apparently reached the pitiful apex of their character arcs in the film series and must now start the slide down back into mediocrity and two-dimensionality. Harry's moodiness is on the horizon, but here it's Ron's time for angst, which just comes off as shallow. The book didn't handle this subplot in a particularly deep way, but you could at least understand why Ron, the dirt poor kid always in the shadow of the celebrity Harry and the whiz Hermione, might deeply resent his friend thrust into the spotlight yet again, but you'd think he take into account how much Harry loathes the attention and how he never seeks it. Watson reverts to that annoying breathlessness that defined her line deliveries in the first film. Even as she must deal with the half-formed love triangle involving Krum and Ron, she becomes less interesting than ever thanks to the incessant overacting.

Also helping out is Moody (Brendan Gleeson), a battle-scarred Auror (dark wizard catcher) with a fake leg and a magical replacement eye. He accepts the empty Defense Against the Dark Arts position, presumably because he clearly has so few limbs left to lose. Gleeson is on fire as the thundering, lumbering Moody, capturing the character's off-kilter, slightly sadistic humor nicely. The only other noteworthy addition is David Tennant as Barty Crouch Jr., though the nature of the character means he remains mostly unseen, unfortunately.

Each of the Triwizard tasks are filmed with a harmonious blend of blockbuster action and darker chills, particularly in the the reedy mire of the lake bottom and the icy fright of the maze. When Harry winds up in a graveyard to face his nemesis, the tone only grows colder, thanks in no small part to Ralph Fiennes' short but sweet appearance as the reconstituted Voldemort. Before he even utters a word, you know they found the right man for the job: Voldemort speaks not with an evil, serpentine hiss but with the ennui befitting someone so powerful. The wretched stammering of his summoned followers doesn't concern him, and the only time he displays any emotion at all is in his wrath toward Harry. Fiennes is one of the finest casting choices yet in a franchise stuffed to the gills with magnificent actors.

Sadly, many of the newcomers fail to elicit any response other than annoyance. Pattinson's job is simply to stand there and look pretty (a damn fine warm-up for Twilight if there ever was one), while Poesy and Ianevski act like caricatures. Miranda Richardson knows the steps but not the rhythm to muckraking gossip hag Rita Skeeter, and what might have been a nice commentary on the corruption of glamorization of the media is sacrificed in favor of a paper-thin characterization (you can deal with adult themes in kid movies; see Pixar). Roger Lloyd Pack plays Barty Crouch Sr. less on the verge of a breakdown as in the novel as insufferably wild-eyed. I know Gary Oldmans had more practice at playing loopy, but compare his mania in the third film to Pack's mugging and there's just no contest in the crazy department.

Still, despite some terrible dialogue delivered in manners that don't help the matter, Goblet of Fire does a marvelous job of sustaining the excellence of the previous film while adding enough plot back in to make a reasonable and linear narrative. I still prefer Azkaban for its artistry, but Newell should be commended for finding a working blend of the inoffensive popcorn sheen of the first two films with the darker tone and direction of the third.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

After Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets solved some of the issues of the first film while further entrenching many of its other weaknesses, Chris Columbus at last parted ways with the franchise as the producers decided to extend the shooting length for the rest of the films to ensure they weren't rushed. After fantasy maestro Guillermo Del Toro declined the offer to direct, the mantle passed to one of his compatriots, Alfonso Cuaròn.

That must have seemed a bit odd to those old enough to know who Alfonso Cuaròn was: his previous film, y tu mamá también, remains one of the most critically lauded films of the decade, but you'd hardly hand the keys of a fantasy franchise to the director for it. The closest he'd even come to fantasy was A Little Princess, which is based on children's literature but not more about a child who believes in magic than a world in which it truly exists. After the first two movies triumphed at the box office, perhaps the producers felt they could do no wrong and found themselves willing to experiment. Even so, it was a gamble.

One that paid off magnificently, I might add. Steve Kloves, still, unfortunately, the writer, apparently read some critiques of the other two films which singled out his devotion to the narrative and mystery of the books and not the character. A curious fixation, as surely the legions of Potter fans already knew what was going to happen, so the emphasis on mystery made little sense.

That's not to say that there's no mysterious air to the film; far from it, it's the only one of the film series yet to actually make you wonder what you'll see next. We know that Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) escapes from the wizard prison Azkaban, and that it somehow makes life for Harry more dangerous, but Cuaròn so streamlines the film (down a healthy 20 minutes from the previous installment) that details are left vague. We never really learn how he escaped, and even the explanation of his crime goes no further than some mumblings of betrayal and of his relationship to Harry. The overwhelming majority of those who have seen or will watch the movie in the future will know all about Sirius, but enough of him is concealed in darkness and Oldman plays him with enough of a manic edge that the character works better than he ever did on the page.

Black's story seems all the more unsettling with Cuaròn's direction. Where the first two films had too much of a glossed-over look, even in the darkness of the Chamber of Secrets, Azkaban borders on the Expressionist in its superb use of shadow and mise-en-scène. Hogwarts now appears more cluttered, more angular, and its sweeping majesty carries a bit of an edge to it. The soul-sucking dementors are not as scary as they perhaps should be, yet the effect of them moving through the scenes are (pardon the pun) chilling. The lone shot of a flower wilting and freezing to herald their advance is more captivating than anything in the first two movies.

Also joining the cast alongside Oldman are Timothy Spall as the sniveling Peter Pettigrew, rat-faced even when he's not turning himself into an animal, and David Thewlis, whose Remus Lupin looks just as dishelved as his Johnny from Naked, only with an air of warmth and soft, encouraging wit. Rounding out the new additions is Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, replacing the late Richard Harris. Gambon thankfully does not attempt to ape Harris' portrayal and instead moves the character somewhat closer to his original personality: in one great bit, he absent-mindedly taps Ron on his broken leg as Ron winces in agony. Emma Thompson's loopy Trewlaney, however, is simply too over-the-top for her own good, and she fails to elicit more than a chuckle or two.

In place of the cluttered narrative of the first two films, Prisoner of Azkaban takes the time to follow its leads, who have matured along with their characters. Ron seems doomed to never move outside of comic relief, but Grint pulls it off nicely, and his burgeoning romantic scenes with Hermione -- more explicitly stated than in the book -- have a sweet, unforced charm to them. Radcliffe, who's never really gotten the angsty aspect of the character down, does a fine job of it here: when he announces his intention to find and kill Sirius Black, he conveys some dark nuance. But it's Watson, normally the weakest link of the trio, who walks away with the entire movie, even outpacing the adults. Hermione's put up with a lot throughout the series, and that one punch she lands on Malfoy still makes me want to stand and cheer.

Unfortunately, Kloves' noble attempt to inject character moments reveal his weaknesses as a writer. Without the safety net of simple recreation to help him, we see his inability to coax nuance out of the story, and the mystery of the film comes from omissions and Cuaròn's framing. Indeed, the director's rapport with the kids garners their best work yet, and the older actors are made a real part of the story and not simply plot devices for the first time. It also helps the film greatly that John Williams backs off the insufferable loudness of his previous scores, and actually this ranks as one of his finest scores and one of his most wonderfully nuanced.

That soundtrack aids the visual poetry of Cuaròn's direction, and combined with the interesting, if muddled, story makes for a major leap forward in the franchise's quality. The director's deft hand with a bigger scale set the stage for Children of Men, the perfect mix of his intimate detail and this newly found epic sweep, and reflects a clear influence of his friend Guillermo Del Toro. This dark, vaguely Expressionist fairy tale is the first of the Harry Potter films to really grab your excitement, and it's a dam good fantasy film in its own right.