Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Brilliant form with beautiful production design (the school setting, mountains in the background), much more detailed, elaborate music by John Williams, and individual pearls in the form of specific scenes in general. Harry’s flight on Buckbeak, for example, reaches the emotional heights of the best moments from of The Lord of the Rings. However, as the minutes passed, the story itself somehow lost its appeal for me. If it wasn’t for the delightful last half-hour, the film would have slipped into being slightly boring. But that’s not a criticism of Alfonso Cuarón, since he literally performed a miracle with a questionable screenplay. (18/06/2004)

I won't damn Columbus and make a god out of Cuaron here anymore because the first half seems like a thematically precise continuation of the poetry of the first two parts, and a few camera tricks or zooms on a freezing flower (although they are formally perfect) don't change the atmosphere much. They may be beneficial for an unbiased viewer, but for me, as a staunch fan of the book, they are just a minimal decoration. The turning point comes when Harry and Hermione reach the Whomping Willow and an incredible massacre ensues, where the fascinating acting etude of the trio Thewlis-Oldman-Rickman is the least of it. And of course, the climax is in the long-lasting finale with time-playing and all the creatures that can only scare the viewer. The only criticism is aimed at the significant screenplay gap: an explanation of who the Scabbers are would probably help. Nevertheless, I've seen the third part probably the most and perhaps I understand its position as the favorite part. However, I prefer Yates' tricks by a hair. (24/02/2007)

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)