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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

Director: David Yates

Critics' rating

Average user rating

2 reviews

Synopsis

Harry returns for a fifth year at Hogwarts School and discovers that most of the wizard community is in denial about his recent encounter with Lord Voldemort. Cornelius Fudge, the Minister for Magic, appoints a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher to watch over the students, as he fears that the Hogwarts headmaster is lying about Voldemort’s return. Unfortunately, the newly appointed teacher’s ministry-approved course leaves the students unprepared and unable to defend themselves, so Harry decides to take matters into his own hands.

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

The fifth in the HP heptalogy thankfully continues the trend started by Prisoner of Azkaban: distancing the series as far as wizardly possible from the first two flat, fastidiously lame flicks. Yates leaps into big-budget cinema like a kid in a candy store, packing in nearly every compelling image from the 870-page source material. Still, while Phoenix tells an entertaining tale, it lacks the cohesive narrative flow of Azkaban.

Harry (Radcliffe)—coming to terms with the death of a friend and the rise of evildoer Lord Voldemort (Fiennes)—is attacked by a happiness-sucking evil spirit called a dementor and is whisked to the Ministry of Magic to face expulsion from Hogwarts for use of defensive magic. The decision is appealed, but Harry’s fifth year still looks grim: Voldemort haunts his all-too-real dreams; Ministry propaganda paints Harry as a loony; and Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), the Ministry’s instated teacher at Hogwarts, is a power-hungry, conniving bitch.

Though hypocrisy and paranoia run rampant through Hogwarts’ halls, Yates scales back the restless tension of what is perhaps the richest, most unsettling book of the bunch so far. Harry—a noticeably more vulnerable Radcliffe—claims to feel “more alone than ever,” but his isolation from Ministry-allied classmates, his torturous run-ins with Umbridge, and his angry outbursts aimed at friends Ron Weasley (Grint) and Hermione Granger (Watson) aren’t heavily factored into the story. Still, the visual effects are well worth a venture off the page, especially the face-off between Voldemort and badass spell-slinger Dumbledore.

Author: Steve Heisler

Time Out Chicago Issue 124: July 12–18, 2007

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User reviews of this film

Jules said...

Posted on Jul 18 2007 09:20 Disjointed and noticably poorer direction than the last movies. A lot of the magic and splendor was lost for montages of the past movies.

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Joe said...

Posted on Jul 16 2007 09:11 Should I read the books first or just watch the movies? I found that I didn't really know what was going on in this movie.... was still good though.

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