The effect of moving readers with Christian piety in medieval romance is not remote, by contrast. That faith was held to be a literal description of the nature and structure of the universe but could be meaningfully integrated on a person-by-person basis (arguably only on that basis). It inspired medieval literary artists to expand people's minds to the extent of the created universe.

Prisoner of Azkaban is more properly a vehicle for romance than The Day After Tomorrow, in that it focuses on its boy wizard's intent efforts to live up to his father's example, as in the medieval Parzival. I'm just not sure that's enough without Harry's story being linked to something more numinous than the primal emotional surge when you find he's pulled it off. That would be enough in a work of realism devoted to an accurate depiction of individual psychology. But of course realism is not an important means in the Harry Potter movies, despite the Dickensian borrowings (the unsympathetic relatives and formidable institutional representatives).

Nobody has combined romance and realism more effectively than Dickens, and he drew on a robust Christian optimism in doing so, as in this passage from Dombey and Son describing how Florence, unloved by her father, maintains "constancy of purpose" by thinking of her mother, who died giving birth to her younger brother, and of that beloved brother, now also dead:

Into her mind, as into all others contending with the great affliction of our moral nature, there had stolen solemn wonderings and hopes, arising in the dim world beyond the present life, and murmuring, like faint music, of recognition in the far off land between her brother and her mother: of some present consciousness in both of her: some love and commiseration for her: and some knowledge of her as she went her way upon the earth.

Dickens's belief in a watchful, sympathetically populated heaven may seem sentimental to current educated tastemakers, but it provides a universal metric for moral evaluation that makes his realistic description of the entire society cohere. (It's far more important than anything in his work resembling Marxist critique. He condemns the institutions of his day, but by reference to their falling off from ideal Christian behavior.)

Prisoner of Azkaban, like the other Harry Potter movies, is an entertainment that heightens already strong childhood feelings, but in a fairly superficial way by comparison to the highest romance standards. Of course, the sources of positive meaning for romance storytellers didn't dry up recently. As the certainty of Christianity has given way in the West as a general cultural conviction, ironic romances have tended to have more impact. (Read what I have to say about ironic romance on this page of my new book.) Medieval romance spun adventures to demonstrate the everpresence of Christian truth; ironic romance brings us into conscious contact with the void where that unshakeable faith used to be, and the protagonist's quest for a new truth often verges on madness, as in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Norman Mailer's An American Dream, and Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.