PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 11/17/05)

The fourth novel in J.K. Rowling’s magical saga of the boy wizard is a sprawling, sumptuous, richly textured book, nearly unfilmable in all its excesses, tangents, and brilliantly tortured plot twists. Mike Newell’s adaptation judiciously trims down the story to its barest and most crucial elements: 14-year-old Harry’s long-awaited confrontation with Voldemort, the unspeakably evil wizard who murdered his parents. In so doing, Newell puts his own stamp on the franchise and delivers the best Potter movie yet filmed.

Even though Goblet of Fire clocks in at a robust 157 minutes, Newell handles the massive story with seeming ease, keeping the pace taut and intensifying the pervasive menace that lurked more subtly in the previous films. Newell, the first Brit to direct a Potter film, brings out the inherent Englishness of Rowling's creation that American Chris Columbus and Mexican Alfonso Cuarón did not (or perhaps could not). Scenes in Hogwarts School are anarchic and ebullient, especially when the Weasley twins finally get a few scenes of their own. The grand Yule Ball sequence, with its simultaneous glamour, awkwardness, and queasy terror, captures the contradictions of being 14 perfectly. And the film’s plot clues are transparent in a way a book cannot be, without sacrificing suspense.

Daniel Radcliffe, in the lead role, succeeds not just with the technical demands of a film that called for him to battle a CG dragon, spend more than 40 hours filming underwater scenes, endure torture, and learn ballroom dancing. He’s also become an increasingly capable actor as Harry’s inner and outer torments have increased, and here Radcliffe delivers an assured, mature performance even when his character is flustered beyond speech (as when faced with gorgeous 18-year-old newcomer Katie Leung, playing Harry’s crush, Cho Chang).

Brendan Gleeson, as teacher Mad-Eye Moody, is magnificently grotesque, sliding into his role with a palpable sense of enjoyment and a degree of lunacy that keeps the audience deliciously off-balance. As always, Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith inhabit their characters like they were born to them. Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, as Harry's (mostly) loyal mates, have more material to work with here, and in their own scenes excel at the respective idiocies particular to teenage boys and girls.

Audiences have been waiting to see He Who Must Not Be Named for years now, and Ralph Fiennes, as the resurrected Voldemort, surpasses imagination. Inhabiting bone-deep evil with a sick, gleeful sneer on his face, Fiennes at once recalls the monster in Alien, not a little of Nosferatu, and some of his work in Schindler's List. It's a dizzying, terrifying combination, and the performance brings the increasing darkness in Rowling's novels to a sharp, visceral level.

Early in the film, Harry accompanies the Weasley family to the Quidditch World Cup, and looks around, awe-struck. Under his breath, he mutters reverently, “I love magic.” What Newell has created with his merry crew leaves one in the same state of awed joy.—Sara Brady

Check out our Feature on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.