Potter Still Making Magic

Our sixth cinematic trip to Hogwarts holds onto the magic with stunning visuals, great acting, and a maturing storyline:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is “spellbinding, even though it is more grounded in reality and less fanciful than previous installments,” writes Claudia Puig in USA Today. “The cinematography is stunning, and the story unfolds in a stately and unhurried fashion.”

• This “meticulously atmospheric and wonderfully acted Potter adventure lands happily—broodingly, but happily—near the top of the series heap, notes Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune.
• Roger Ebert says the film “opens and closes well, and has wondrous art design and cinematography as always, only more so.” But, he notes in the Chicago Sun-Times, the hurried “middle passages spin their wheels somewhat.”
• The Potter series, observes Richard Corliss in Time, is “a proud, mammoth act of commercial, communal filmmaking. It's Hollywood at its finest.”

(More Harry Potter stories.)