Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

"Is that really what my hair looks like from the back?" –– Even though I am watching the third installment in the Potter franchise for at least the twentieth time, I still cannot get over the Cuaron exaltation. Rather, I would say he was just lucky to have one of the best books in the franchise, which had the potential to appeal to the widest possible audience. I am not entirely satisfied with the result, though. For one thing, the credit goes to Mr. Dumbass Kloves, whose typical screenwriting trademarks – his classic "catchphrases", weird sense of humor (the cleaning lady scene - I still have not figured out what the hell that was supposed to be about!) and the insensitive reduction of the book, have of course taken their toll (The absolute bare minimum of information about Harry's parents' past is given, and nowhere is it explained that it was actually Lupin, Harry's father and co. who were the people who created the Marauder’s Map!). Plus, then the other thing I am not entirely happy with is the director himself. What disappointed me was the occasional absence of emotion. Some of the scenes that should have been really atmospheric in some way – Harry’s flight on Buckbeak, the meeting in the Shrieking Shack, or Lupin's transformation left me cold as ice, they felt devoid of emotion, and often even laughable. I do not know how much of this is the fault of the director, the cast, or possibly the special effects people, but I did not expect to be so bored in some places. However, now for the good points: there is a great soundtrack by John Williams, Radcliffe finally got a little better at acting (although the "I'll kill him!" scene still looks ridiculous), there are nice exteriors and, except for Buckbeak and the who looked very digital, very nice special effects. The Dementors are okay, the atmosphere is passable, too, and while it seems like I was really critical previously and did not like the movie, I was not - I actually did like it. I just do not get the general hype around this installment. I could understand it with the fifth installment, but definitely not with this one. (14/07/2008)

Alfonso Cuarón managed to mix exactly the right amount of tension, emotion, fairy tale, and thriller to create a film that is suitable for essentially all generations, captures attention with its story and characters, and is also skillfully directed. Although the last two films were not bad, "Prisoner of Azkaban" simply could not be surpassed by any other. (29/01/2014)

I read in many comments that only now, thanks to the change in director, Harry Potter has got the true Potter atmosphere, that it has finally gone dark, and so on. Well, I think those are pretty misleading statements. After all, how could the previous two films have the atmosphere of Prisoner of Azkaban when they (like their predecessors) had basically nothing going in them that would require it? So in terms of atmosphere, I wouldn't say it's that much to Alfonso Cuarón's credit - he was just lucky to get this part. What is already to his merit, of course, is the film's thrilling pace, the omnipresent playfulness (the scene with the boogeyman, when the camera flies back and forth through the mirror, for example), the suspenseful, even horror scenes with the dementors, and the sensitive direction of the actors, whose heroes start to get beaten up by adolescence, but we don't stop liking them even for a moment. And then, of course, there are the new characters. Both Gary Oldman and David Thewlis are a joy to watch, and when they are joined by Alan Rickman in the Shrieking Shack, the film's best scene is taken care of. Finally, I'd like to mention John Williams' score - Prisoner of Azkaban is the last installment of the series for which he composed it, and he did an absolutely wonderful job. (07/09/2015)

It must be excruciating to film a year-long story from the disjointed, ever-changing Harry Potter universe, no matter what the filmmakers prattle on about in the BluRay bonus features. Cuarón has thus proven himself a messiah, whose ability to maintain a unified storyline and focus on the details, particularly in individual scenes whose careful selection is the only saving grace keeping the entire adaptation from disintegrating into a series of clumsily pasted together visual sequences. It can be seen that script editing and pre-production played a significant role here. The individual episodes, then, not only make sense to readers of the book, who, in short, want to at least see some of the things they read, but are capable of assembly into a coherent story on their own. Each scene therefore has purpose and moves the plot forward. It was thanks to this meticulous preparation that it was even possible to focus particularly on the filmmaking aspects, and that's why the third installment of all the Potter films has the most interesting cinematography, mise-en-scene, and various small quirks and elements in the second and subsequent layers. (03/04/2016)

Harry Potter has always been a bit of a light rip-off of Peter Jackson's opus. It cleverly borrows various details, not very conspicuously, but I’ve found several very similar scenes or specific things in all three parts. In the third part, it is clearly the Dementors, who annoyingly resemble the breathtakingly executed Nazgûl. However, the truth is that this part is the darkest and least childish in the whole series. For the first time, there are horror elements, which will probably escalate further in later parts. It's not significantly better than the previous two parts, maybe just a little bit. (12/08/2006)