With the fantasy kicked up a notch and a new director, Harry Potter catches ‘Fire. ‘It’s taken them long enough, but the movies have finally gotten Harry Potter right. Despite the reported $2.7 billion earned by the series’ three previous attempts, it’s not until “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” that a film has successfully re-created the sense of stirring magical adventure and engaged, edge-of-your-seat excitement that has made the books such an international phenomenon.
Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times
Reviewers everywhere seem to like this film. For my part, I liked this paragraph in Manohla Dargis’ review in The New York Times:
Now 16, Mr. Radcliffe pouts reasonably well, but has yet to develop the skill to make that pouting feel emotionally substantive. This might pose a serious obstacle for the films, but it hasn’t yet, largely because watching him and his young co-stars – the excellent Rupert Grint as Ron, the touchingly earnest Emma Watson as Hermione – grow up onscreen has its dividends. Cinema doesn’t just immortalize actors, locking them into youth, it also solicits our love in a way that books do not, since it isn’t just the characters we fall for, but the actors playing them, too. Mr. Radcliffe isn’t an acting titan or even one of the Culkins, but you root for him nonetheless, partly because you want Harry to triumph and partly because there is something poignant about how this actor struggles alongside his character.
And this, also from Dargis:
[Ralph] Fiennes is an actor for whom a walk on the darker side is not just a pleasure, but liberation. His Voldemort may be the greatest screen performance ever delivered without the benefit of a nose; certainly it’s a performance of sublime villainy.
PG-13 now, no longer just PG.