Quite baffling how much less this is interested in exploring Harry's interiority than Azkaban, doesn't necessarily help that Newell's direction has none of the formal precision & wondrous sense of time/space Cuarón brought to the franchise. This still works, for what it's worth, as a bunch of thrilling set pieces chained together, has a delightfully hammy performance by Brendan Gleeson and almost makes up for its lack of substance by executing one of the most emotionally horrific moments of this series…

Probably helps that this is the best of Rowling's books, because it clearly marks the beginning of where this story is headed both tonally and thematically (also the time travel stuff's just really neat), but the way Cuarón develops a visual language for the emotional turmoil of these children, Harry most prominently of course, by re-imagining the Hogwarts grounds as this intricate cabinet of mirrors that they have to navigate through & make sense of on their own, in order to…