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Mild and wild about harry

Reveiws for Harry Potter and teh Order of the Phoenix

NY Times by A.O. Scott

“Order of the Phoenix” has its grim, bleak elements, but it is also, after all, an installment in a mighty multimedia entertainment franchise. And like its predecessors, it manages to succeed as a piece of entertainment without quite fulfilling its potential as a movie. Perhaps by design, the films never quite live up to the books. This one proves to be absorbing but not transporting, a collection of interesting moments rather than a fully integrated dramatic experience. This may just be a consequence of the necessary open-endedness of the narrative, or of an understandable desire not to alienate “Potter” readers by taking too many cinematic chances.

Although “Order of the Phoenix” is not a great movie, it is a pretty good one, in part because it does not strain to overwhelm the audience with noise and sensation. There are some wonderful special-effects-aided set pieces — notably an early broomstick flight over London — and some that are less so. People waving wands at one another, even accompanied by bright lights and scary sounds, does not quite sate this moviegoer’s appetite for action. But the production design (by Stuart Craig) and the cinematography (by Slawomir Idziak) are frequently astonishing in their aptness and sophistication. The interiors of the Ministry of Magic offer a witty, nightmarish vision of wizardly bureaucracy, while Harry’s angst and loneliness register in Mr. Idziak’s cold, washed-out shades of blue.

Baltimore Sun by Michael Sragow

What could have been grim in lesser hands becomes Grimm and expansive in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Even when it isn't laugh-out-loud funny, the movie gives off the crackle of humorous audacity. With a wicked deadpan rather than a wink, it draws parallels between Umbridge's assault on student freedoms at Hogwarts and some of our own leaders' attempts to curtail civil liberties post-Sept. 11. Radcliffe has said, "Somebody described her as a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Freddy Krueger." The way Staunton plays her -- brilliantly -- she's an academic and a paper-pusher operating under the delusion that she's a queen, or maybe an imperial president, whipping a slack democracy into shape.

Much of what Umbridge does is simultaneously ominous and hilarious, especially when she institutes a "back to basics" approach to the teaching of Defense Against the Dark Arts. She's got the quick-tongued yet status quo repartee of the quintessentially thoughtless, even before she turns into a mini-Mussolini. And she's got the metronomelike pseudo-grace of the innately graceless: You can see it in the way she stirs her tea. When Umbridge needs to be an outright threat, Staunton makes her as vicious as they come. Staunton lifts everybody's game, including, in their few scenes together, Maggie Smith's McGonagall, who expresses a real class act's disdain at Umbridge's upstart arrogance, and Emma Thompson's Trelawney, who whips up a tangy comic pathos in mere seconds.

The Sun's review was missing sections that were in the paper. But there's a nice profile of Imelda Staunton who plays Prof Umbridge. It starts like this ...

Two years before she was offered the role of Dolores Jane Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a friend of Imelda Staunton's called her up to say he'd just read J.K. Rowling's book and that there was a part in it she'd be perfect for. "So I read it," Staunton says, "and thought, 'Small, squat, ugly, toadlike woman - thanks a lot.'"

The Washington Post doesn't have an online review at this time.

harry potter and the order of the phoenix