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.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Having re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before seeing the first half of the story in David Yates' latest, I entered the cineplex ready to dub the latest adaptation of the most popular book franchise in the world Harry Potter and the Interminable Holocaust Allegory. This would not be entirely Yates' fault, mind you; there are fundamental flaws in the story that cannot be blamed on anyone involved with the production. The problems inherent in the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are the issues inherent in J.K. Rowling's final entry (one hopes) in her wildly successful series. When I devoured the closing chapter of Harry Potter's saga as an 18-year-old leaving high school just as the most visible pop culture symbol of my childhood came to a close, I loved every page. Absorbed by the action, I plowed through 759 pages in mere hours, sad to see these characters slipping away even as I propelled myself toward the end with breakneck speed.

What I saw upon a second reading, however, was the weakest book of the series since it moved into darker territory in the third entry. Pacing problems mired the first half in directionless muck, wallowing in dystopic Holocaust/post-9/11 allegory until exposition suddenly kicked in and never let up until the end (even the epilogue, which I found deeply unsatisfactory even on the first read, summarizes the futures of the characters with banal resolution). Yates' biggest contribution to the three Potter films he's helmed has been his commitment to retaining as much as possible of the novels while still releasing films at acceptable blockbuster length. Even The Order of the Phoenix, the longest and most meandering of the books, was whittled down to one of the shortest running times of any of the franchise movies without sacrificing the core of the work.

Ergo, his decision to split Deathly Hallows into two parts speaks less to the overflow of great ideas in Rowling's epic than a misguided attempt to use the final entry to give fans what fans always want: the entire book transposed to screen. Of course, fans don't know what they want, and it's interesting that the only fully successful adaptation of Rowling's books, Prisoner of Azkaban, owes its power to sacrificing the familiar plot elements to reach for a more magical and unpredictable atmosphere. There's nothing of the sort to be found in Yates' films, which suck the feeling of wonder from Hogwarts -- this was particularly evident in The Half-Blood Prince, which intriguingly dug beneath the oppressive and despairing tone of Rowling's best novel to find the feeling of appreciation and nostalgia for that which will soon be lost in the coming war, only to bungle this fascinating insight with a drab visual style.

I say all of this negative stuff to come to a surprising conclusion: David Yates got it right this time. More than that, he corrected what has been horribly wrong with the film franchise. If the director's defining trademark on the series so far was to ably cut down on excess while getting the story across unscathed, he proves by giving himself the space to breathe that, while he is still not cut out for the magical side of Harry Potter, he is abundantly capable of doing the one thing that no previous Potter film has managed: delve into the characters.

Whether shackled to the plot or simply under the impression that everyone had already read the books and thus did not need introduction nor updates on the characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione have often felt like spectators in their own saga, ushered from setpiece to setpiece before being made to deliver some line about the necessity of getting some Macguffin, the red herring that is Severus Snape and/or the importance of friendship, usually in the most breathless manner possible (Emma Watson in particular has always spoken her lines as if a mule kicked her in the stomach before the director yelled "Action!"). Here, however, Yates uses his spare running time to focus on the characters, and if Deathly Hallows Part 1 is about anything, it's about how these three young adults react to the horrifying situation in which they find themselves, a predicament so dire that even these battle-tested youths feel hopeless and directionless when confronted with it.

Undoubtedly aiding Yates and his aversion to the more mystical side of the mythos is the fact that Deathly Hallows is by some measure Rowling's most straightforward book, even if it is a tangled web of exposition. More indebted to Lord of the Rings than anything, the final book relies on an epic sweep of action to make up for a confounding and unsatisfying explanation for the final battle and heavy exposition throughout. Its emphasis on Holocaust imagery allows Yates to finally apply his more standard visuals to great usage, managing to turn a color palette that consists primarily of grays and grayer grays into something expressive.

So how does Harry Potter and the List of Schindler turn out? From the opening moments, as the sound of rusting and shrieking metal builds over a black screen before violently cutting out as the screen flashes an extreme close-up (the young woman in front of me actually dropped her popcorn tub in shock at this moment), Yates does a spectacular job of creating a sense of extreme discomfort, using Alexandre Desplat's dissonant score to keep you on edge even when the characters are sitting in a home. Nowhere is safe, no one can be trusted and it's only a matter of time before Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) uses his new control over the Ministry of Magic to track down his prey.

What, then, is a chosen one to do? After unloading a heaping pile of angst onto the audience with the film installment and indulging in puppy-dog teen romance with the sixth, Harry Potter and the Seven Beauties throws young adults into the real world, and the idea that Rowling plundered imagery from the most catastrophic event of modern times is a shrewd statement on how jarring true adulthood can be for increasingly sheltered youth. There are a few light chuckles to be found here as Rupert Grint continues his adorable "aw shucks" goofiness as Ron, but the dominant mood here is one of horror. Every time the kids manage to teleport themselves away from a fight, someone else finds them, and it's a wonder any of their hearts ever stop racing enough for them to sleep. After being decently entertained by the fourth film, bored by the fifth and frustrated by the misplaced emotional focus of the sixth, I was suddenly riveted. I even wanted to cover my eyes at times, so shaken by the world collapsing around these characters.

Mind you, there are a number of stumbling blocks in the film. For all the skill with which Yates handles the downtime, Harry Potter and the Boy in the Striped Pajamas still drags on far too long. A good 20 minutes could and should have been excised from the film for better flow. The gag of Harry's friends using Polyjuice Potion to disguise themselves as him to become decoys leads to some painfully unfunny humor too quickly out of the gate. Moreover, the dialogue in and around this scene is shamelessly expository, recalling not only moments from previous films but bits that were cut from the books for time. Another holdover from the book, Ron's petulant attitude toward the other two, is tired by this point: Rowling had so exhausted Ron's jealousy of Harry by the seventh book that she had to use the MacGuffin of the Horcrux, one of the seven enchanted objects that holds a piece of Voldemort's tattered soul, to bring out that tension again. At least Grint sells it well, and as much as this sort of thing brings back the angst that Rowling and the filmmakers separately beat to death with the fifth installment.

Actually, let's talk about that acting. I've always felt bad for the child actors in this series, forced to grow up and look talented when blanketed by, you know, every major story in modern British film. Still, they've never excelled, and Radcliffe in particular has never proven himself a star. Whether the result of maturation or the desire to go out with a bang, the three principal actors have dug deep and found a well of talent from which they'd not previously drawn. When Grint goes into his jealous fit, his eyes terrified me; I honestly thought he might lunge for not just Harry but Hermione as well. Watson tones down the histrionics and drops the endearingly nerdy side to tap into Hermione's insecurities at being the child of two Muggle parents, a fear exacerbated in the pureblood frenzy engendered by Voldemort (whose own blood is "tainted" with Muggle non-magic just as rumors abound to this day that Jews nested in Hitler's family tree). As for Radcliffe, he's come a long way from the boy who agonizingly ruined the terrifying revelation of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return in The Goblet of Fire.

Yet these deepened insights come not from me-time showboating but group interplay. The way the three characters play off each other brings out these new traits, and for the first time all are developed in equal measure. Yates inserts a scene that was not in the book, placed after Ron, corrupted by the Horcrux, leaves his friends to try and find his family. As a devastated Hermione hugs a radio, Nick Cave's "O Children" comes on, and Harry, aware that they might both die at any second, extends a hand to his second-oldest friend and the two share a cathartic slow dance. This sequence is so ingenious, so well-executed and so planned-ahead for a later vision of Harry and Hermione kissing that torments the addled Ron that Rowling should call up Yates and writer Steve Kloves and thank them for improving her work.

When the action picks up, its more straightforward style allows Yates to focus less on the awe of a magical duel than the sheer terror of being hunted. After that failed lighthearted scene with the Harry duplicates, the Death Eater ambush that awaits the gang as they move to a safehouse is fantastically executed, harrowing and bewildering in the sudden assault. Harry Potter and the Day the Clown Cried even throws in a noble death that has already inspired various "Never Forget" messages and is a surprisingly tear-jerking moment considering the character in question hasn't shown up in the film series since The Chamber of Secrets. Even when Yates gets a bit too frenetic with a forest chase sequence, the action here is exhilarating and the kind of stuff that makes you grab your seat arm tighter. I also adored a brief animated sequence used to provide background on the titular deathly hallows, a bit of Gothic shadow puppetry that is as dark as anything in the film proper. Ben Hibon, who designed and directed this segment, went all out to make a haunting piece that resembles a sort of Slavic woodcarving of an old fairy tale, the kind that made even the happy endings fatalistic.

Naturally, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I feels incomplete, the setup to a finale that won't come until May of next year. But if having to wait six months is the price to pay for a Harry Potter film that finally passes muster, it's worth it. Previous films have used that who's-who supporting cast as a crutch, cutting to one of Alan Rickman's deliciously drawled one-liners or Maggie Smith's pert, slightly condescending humanism. Here, there's no one to distract from the principal cast, who are working without a net. They succeed beyond my wildest expectations, and after debating whether to see this at all or just wait until I unethusiastically double-bill the two parts of the film in May to break myself of the mediocre imagining of a key part of my childhood, I am thrilled that everyone involved finally got it right. The previous top dog of the films, The Prisoner of Azkaban, had the magic but not the story. This film, which lacks the magic by design, balances the visual impact with solid, if imperfect, storytelling, and it's all buoyed by terrific acting. Who could have guessed that the film to break Hollywood of its string of mediocre, audience-insulting blockbusters this year would be the latest entry in one of the most mediocre and audience-insulting blockbuster franchises of recent years?

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Tim Burton's detractors may find themselves supporting Alice in Wonderland, if only because it makes their case against him so simple. It contains nearly all of Burton's usual thematic and stylistic flourishes, but to no end. Had I not walked out of the theater with several short pages filled with notes, I might have assumed that, like Alice, I'd merely drifted off in a nebulous dream/reality world for two hours and left again. Vincent Canby once compared Heaven's Gate to a "forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." Alice is like a forced tour of the living room of the protagonist in one of Burton's better movies: it's weird, yes, but it seems drab and uninteresting. In a way, I sympathize with Burton: by this point, so many adaptations, homages, and re-imaginings of Lewis Carroll's novel exist across various artistic media that one must doubt whether any wonder remains in Alice at all.

Alice starts promisingly, revealing an older protagonist than the pre-teen Alice of the original story who openly disdains the social mores that bind her. She does not wear a corset and considers refusing the hand of a sniveling young lord who throws an engagement party for himself before asking her to marry him. This Alice remembers familiar images from a recurring dream -- a smiling cat, a rabbit with a clock, a blue caterpillar -- and receives a shock when she begins to see some of these creatures walking about in the real world. Naturally, she follows the rabbit to its hole, falls in and, well, you know.

Supposedly Burton envisioned his Alice as a re-imagining of the original story, so he takes elements from both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its loose sequel, Through the Looking Glass and invents new ones to make a sort of Return to Oz for Wonderland. But that infamously dark slab of nominal kiddie fare, or at least that appears to have been the plan.

For Alice in Wonderland is a film of buts. Alice is returning to Wonderland, but she doesn't remember the last time so she largely follows the same path she took upon her visit. The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has taken over and subjugated the landscape, but Wonderland still has a light mood about it. Yes, it looks like a Burton film, with tree limbs twisted into the shapes of gnarled hands and straight lines broken into odd angles, but none of it makes in impression. Burton seems to have used his storyline as an excuse to make the place dull, not twisted and evil, but spare and uninteresting. Perhaps that's the point, that a Wonderland without any sense of wonder at all is more inherently unsettling than an astonishing Wonderland that conveys a sense of corruption and mutilation, but the fact remains that Burton made more memorable worlds out of the idyllic estate in Beetlejuice and the suburbs of Edward Scissorhands than he does with a world often likened to a severe drug trip.

Most of the actors appear to have caught wise to the listlessness of the film even as they stood in front of green screens and acted out the disjointed, lethargic script. Matt Lucas (Tweedle Dee and Dum) and Anne Hathaway (the White Queen, who looks like she set aside time to appear in the film between touring with Evanescence) are only memorable because of their costuming and rendering, and, though everyone speaks with a British accent, the truly British actors get relegated to the completely CGI characters (and what is the point of casting Stephen Fry and then giving him maybe 10 lines?). Bonham Carter proves a notable exception, a Brit allowed to appear in person, more or less, who offers the only consistently emotional characterization in the film. Watch the isolation in her eyes, wavering between spoiled egomania and loneliness, or the way her lip quivers when she considers if perhaps she went too far in her quest for power and questions whether it really is better to be feared than loved.

Compare Carter to Depp, who hasn't looked so bored since the Pirates sequels. One can understand why his performance of the Mad Hatter would be all over the place, but playing an oddball does not entitle an actor to carte blanche, and Depp's wildly inconsistent performance undercuts any laughs with too-random asides and questionable attempts at sincerity. Why does Depp slip in and out of a Scottish accent? Why does he think he can get away with hamming it up all over the place and suddenly inspire pity and connection by lowering his voice for a minute? And how could Burton put both Depp, so capable with mad characters, and Crispin Glover, who may actually be insane, not only in the same film but some of the same scenes and draw absolutely no energy from them?

The one bright light of the film -- and this is nothing to scoff at -- is Alice. Mia Wasikowska receives few opportunities to make a fully-formed person out of her character, but she deftly succeeds at hitting the right mood. Wasikowska is at once waifish and fragile in the Victorian fashion yet strong-willed and capable, and her Alice is easily one of the most feminist heroines to appear in any Disney production. The narrative suffers from the speed with which Alice accepts what's happening to her and moves through most of the film simply trusting that she is in a dream, but that confidence at least reflects well on the character and it provides a strong foothold for Wasikowska to break out as a true leading lady, one who genuinely leads; it's hard to repress a "right on" when she ignores a prophecy that dictates her actions in Wonderland and definitively states "I make the path."

Yet Burton neglects his adept starlet, focusing instead on visuals that lack a shred of the creativity, making a drab steppe out of a world ripe for his demented, (occasionally) endearing big-kid sensibility. The entire third act is a complete wash -- even compared to the rest of this bore -- devolving into a slack faux-epic battle that bypasses Alice for The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings and even sucks the spark out of Carter's formerly enjoyable performance. Burton cannot even summon any imagination for the Jabberwocky, simply transplanting John Tenniel's original visual conception of the dragon-like creature without adding a single facet of his own design. And the refreshing feminism of the film finds an odd conclusion, with Alice back in the real world asserting herself in a manner befitting her inner strength even as the film suggests she will spend her adulthood subjugating and pillaging China in the name of mercantilism. How's that for a happy ending?

Alice demonstrates the pitfalls that come with Burton's increasing laziness as a screenwriter, eschewing original stories such as Edward Scissorhands and Big Fish for derivative re-imaginings of other stories that simply lay a template of half-hearted auterial concerns -- outcasts, Gothic aesthetics and daddy issues, which are largely and mercifully absent in this film, at least in the protagonist. I'm at an utter loss to explain how the film can be at once so cluttered, as slapdash as Depp's performance, and so loose, desolate and unappealing. Some films fail because they don't make any sense; the chief flaw of this one is that it makes too much. We're meant to believe, I think, that Wonderland brings out the champion dormant in Alice, giving her that last ounce of self-confidence needed to face the real world, but as I left the theater all I could think about was how much she towered above the land she saved even when she wasn't nibbling on size-altering scones.

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.

Secrets & Lies

It takes a certain amount of gumption to try to raise funding for a film and gather a cast without a single word committed to a page, but Mike Leigh's made a noble go of it for three decades. He made is first film in 1972, and didn't manage to make other (expressly for the screen, that is) until 1988. Just reading about him makes me curious, but I became about as big a fan as a single film can create when I saw Leigh's superb Happy-Go-Lucky at the tail end of last year. Perhaps the reason it took me so long to actually watch another one of his films is that I had trouble picking between them. Now, I'm not one for fate, but I got my copy of this film in my Netflix shipment today, and before I popped it in, I remembered that yesterday Roger Ebert added a new essay to his Great Movies collection. I brought up his site and what should be his entry but Secrets & Lies? Figuring that could only be a good sign, I dove right in.

And what a find! Mike Leigh's Secret & Lies is a brutal look into a family whose decades of buried problems will explode at the 21st birthday of its youngest member. The film starts as a young black woman attends the funeral of her adoptive mother. Hortense Cumberbatch (the only way that name could be any more British is if her nickname was somehow "Union Jack"), an optometrist, decides to track down her biological mother, though why we're never really told, a minor but noticeable flaw.

Her mother is Cynthia Purley, played as a tearful bundle of nerves by Brenda Blethyn. Cynthia lives in a ratty town house with her 20-year old daughter Roxanne, a layabout who works as a street sweeper. When Hortense rings her, Cynthia tearfully hangs up in fear, then takes her second call and agrees to meet her abandoned daughter. We see the first piece of the title's derivation in their meeting, as Cynthia initially refuses to believe Hortense could be her daughter, because she's never slept with a black man. Then some nugget of deeply buried memory finally bubbles through decades of repression and a look of tragicomic revelation flashes across Blethyn's face. Leigh's method of improvising a script with his actors is on full display in this scene; these two characters are working their way into each other because that's what the actors did for weeks before shooting.

Cynthia has a brother Maurice (the great Timothy Spall) a photographer trapped in a cold marriage with his wife Monica. The scenes in which Maurice sets his clients in poses and coaxes smiles out them seem to exist thematically only to set up an explosive line later in the film, but they add some humor to the proceedings. In contrast to his sister's crowded little home, Maurice and his wife life in a spacious, clean home and have no children. Cynthia despairs over the fact that Maurice hasn't called her in two years, and blames Monica, a fair assumption.

Maurice misses his sister as well, and invites her and his niece over for Roxanne's 21st birthday. Cynthia brings along "her friend" Hortense, and the stage is set for a familial explosion. The party plays out like an intense hybrid of Hitchcock and soap opera. Roxanne brings her boyfriend Paul, a man thoroughly cowed by his pushy lover. He looks terrified and withdrawn throughout the party, as if he somehow expects what's about to happen. At last, Cynthia can't help herself, and spills her secret: this is my daughter.

Like a domino tipped over, Cynthia's admission brings out secret after lie. Leigh's characters, in a thoroughly interesting move, never bring up Hortense's race, something that especially surprised me considering how trashy Roxanne is. The characters simply have too many important things to work out to give a damn about something so trivial. For Roxanne, the simple knowledge that she has a half-sister is enough to send her into a rage.

After details start flying out, Maurice finally snaps. He screams "I've spent my entire life trying to make people happy!" and you know he isn't just referring to his job. In only a few lines, Spall absolutely brings the house down and, though this is Blethyn's show through and through, he steals a moment of spotlight just for him. After all the dirty laundry is aired, we see the family start over. If the ending is incongruously upbeat, it's because they've all worked through a perverse sort of group therapy and have nowhere to go but it.

This is only the second Mike Leigh film I've seen, but I see a pattern already. His films operate with characters who stand outside real life but, because of his workshop method of script-writing, the movies nevertheless have just a dab of verité about them. They're almost like a mixture of Werner Herzog and John Cassavetes as filtered through a British soap opera. It's a testament both to the writing and Blethyn's skill that her constant state of tearful breakdown never becomes repetitive nor unintentional funny; instead, she puts in a completely affecting performance. I don't know if Secrets & Lies has an underlying message--apart from the overt comment on how we are so protective of our secrets that we even close ourselves off from those who know them--but I don't care, because I feel as if I've gotten to know this bizarre little family over the course of 2 hours.