Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie reviews
It has been eight long years since the Harry Potter series first debuted on the big screen, and while the hardcore fans are still just as dedicated as ever, it’s hard to say that the same level of magic and wonder remains for the rest of us. There aren’t many other franchises (if any) that have delivered this many installments in such a short period of time, but as Warner Brothers races to finish these movies before the cast outgrows their characters, clearly audience burnout is the furthest thing from their minds… [Film Junk]
Kids’ stuff is a thing of the past in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Suddenly looking quite grown up, the students at Hogwarts are forced to grapple with heavy issues of mortality, memory and loss in this sixth installment in the series of bigscreen adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s Potter tales. Dazzlingly well made and perhaps deliberately less fanciful than the previous entries, this one is played in a mode closer to palpable life-or-death drama than any of the others and is quite effective as such. Delayed by Warner Bros. from a late 2008 release date so as to spread the wealth after “The Dark Knight” scored so mightily last summer, this “Prince” is poised to follow its predecessors as one of the year’s two or three top-earning films… [Variety]
Harry is better than ever, a triumph of visual wonder and emotional storytelling. Only Muggles, who wouldn’t know Slytherin from Gryffindor, will dismiss it as kid stuff for the multitudes who drank the Kool-Aid of J.K. Rowling’s seven books. The rap on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth of Rowling’s books to be filmed (number seven will be two movies), is that it’s an interim tease, all buildup and no release. Like that’s bad. Like character and motivation have no place after Michael Bay banished them in Transformers 2… [Rolling Stone]
