Wild About Harry

The best of the Harry Potter films so far, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is also hands down the scariest, and the deepest. With all due respect to Chris Columbus, who has shifted from directing to co-producing while bequeathing to director Alfonso Cuarón some terrific sets and the talented screenwriter Steve Kloves, the latest of Harry's excellent adventures is an inspired meeting of minds and (more to the point) hearts, between Cuarón and Potter creator J.K. Rowling. In plain Potter-speak, Columbus -- who directed the capable if uninspired Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and the suffocatingly dull Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets -- is a bit of a Muggle, a solid citizen altogether too grounded in the common-sense world. Perhaps Columbus is too well-adjusted to commit fully to Rowling's instinctive affinity for the outsider, or her grasp of that children's power -- especially with abandoned kids like Harry -- to create parallel universes that simultaneously give shape to their darkest fears, and provide them with alternative communities that redeem their loneliness.

Cuarón has explored this territory before in his adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's old-fashioned tale A Little Princess, a small jewel of a movie about a poor little rich girl whose storytelling gifts transform her pricey boarding school from an arid emotional wasteland into a warm oasis of the imagination. Despite loud championing by the critics and a re-release by Warner Bros., the public turned its back on this exquisite picture. They're unlikely to do the same with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and not only because it's a juggernaut going in. The movie is a marvel of special effects seamlessly hitched to a powerful coming-of-age story. Part of the secret of Rowling's success is her ability to tap into the mind of the modern adolescent, a terrain mined by Cuarón in Y Tu Mamá También. To judge by minor sartorial upgrades (Hermione has dumped the plaid uniform for cool jeans, and even Ron Weasley looks a little less as if he just rolled out of a sleeping bag) and a whiff of romance in the air, Harry, played once again by the cute but wanly inexpressive Daniel Radcliffe, and his pals are growing up, though not enough to jettison the prankish vitality that makes the Potter novels such a gas for kids of all ages.

Cuarón clearly enjoys his special effects. In the priceless opening scenes, Harry misuses his powers to inflate his hated Aunt Marge (Pam Ferris) and send her floating off, a furious balloon popping buttons, into the ether. Fleeing from his awful relatives, he's picked up by a purple Knight bus, a triple-decker conveyance complete with a scrofulous bus conductor and a shrunken head gabbing unstoppably in a Caribbean accent, and rushed through the quiet Muggle streets to the Leaky Cauldron inn.

And so to Hogwarts, a haven not only for trainee wizards but for every child in the world who finds school an infinitely more inviting place to live than home. With its grumpy talking paintings and its ghosts flitting merrily through the halls, Hogwarts is not just an eccentrically jolly magic castle but a safe house, patrolled by the usual severe but for the most part kindly teaching staff. Michael Gambon, uncharacteristically benign in his knotted beard, replaces the late Richard Harris as headmaster Dumbledore, and several new characters complete the picture: David Thewlis as Professor Lupin, a tweedy professor of the Dark Arts, and an entertainingly hammy Emma Thompson as a hippie-spinsterish prof of Divination who sees big trouble in Harry's future. In fact, the future has already arrived, in the person of Sirius Black, an escaped prisoner convicted of collaborating with the dastardly Lord Voldemort (valiantly dispatched by Harry in a previous installment) in the deaths of Harry's parents. Black has escaped from the fearsome prison of Azkaban and is headed for Hogwarts, which for Harry's protection is now being guarded by the dreaded Dementors, fluttering batlike creatures who suck the souls from their victims. They appear to be particularly interested in Harry's, which is about to embark on its own long, dark night as he tries to discover who betrayed his parents, and why.