Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates)

I spent this afternoon seeing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix -- I'm frequently a little behind on popular culture and the last few weeks have been very busy. Plus, a movie theater is the one thing with which my otherwise institutionally well-endowed neighborhood is not equipped, so I waited until my friends in the next town over were ready to go. I found Order of the Phoenix to be a mixed bag. It went by really quickly, and was the first of the films to demand that its viewers be intimately familiar with the source novel to follow the script. ( Read more... )

Taken all in all, this film was a curate's egg experience: parts of it were excellent, but the structural issues and the weaknesses of presentation dragged it down as a whole below the level of both its immediate predecessors. I shall hope for better work from Yates on the next installment.