I want to stop now, however, because I'm conscious of merely groping toward ideas about romance in the modern world. I don't want to make too big a claim of the kind that begs people to fire exceptions at you. I can think of some myself. The Judy Garland Wizard of Oz is an enduring quest romance with an allegorical structure (Dorothy's companions on the road personify embattled facets of her own personality) and yet no greater ethos than to provide a varied program of expert entertainers. Aiming a little higher, Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (1950) is a lush, coolly seductive example of romance in which meaning is provided by a reverence for art. I could perhaps generalize from this that romance offers a triumphant affirmation of the irrational, and presents the hero's confluence with the irrational as an ideal, and that Harry Potter's growing up is just too small for romance's boots. But while David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) is given over to the director's idiosyncratic vision as much as Orpheus, it is at the same time a romance about a young suburban man's choosing between dark and light paternal models, and thus not entirely categorically distinguishable from Prisoner of Azkaban. So I want to tread lightly and say merely that I believe there's something more to my indifference to a movie like Prisoner of Azkaban than a matter of taste. (I'm certainly not trying to convince fans that they shouldn't like the Harry Potter movies, just that whatever these movies can do, others have done more fully.)

All that said, many of the details of Cuarón's movie are charmingly conceived and cleverly designed and shot: the way the first Dementor enters the frame, like a tattered shroud fluttering in slow motion, is particularly haunting; the time-travel sequence is as well done as any I can remember; the school's live-action oil paintings are both dazzling and funny; and Emma Thompson as the myopic professor of clairvoyance is inspiredly loopy.

Unfortunately there's also a lot of crap that comes with the series that Cuarón can't do anything with. Harry's friends lack pungency and their rivalry with the snotty upper-crust Draco Malfoy is particularly tiresome and as far as I could tell irrelevant to the plot. (So why waste that allegorical name on him?) Overall, the movie has about the same mix of enjoyable and annoying elements as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). In addition, it takes place in a more originally and fully appointed world, though it offers less sheer moviemaking excitement, than Spielberg's 20-year-old sweepstakes entry.

Your mama

Cuarón made these embarrassing political comments quoted in Newsweek, comparing President Bush and Tony Blair to characters in the Harry Potter books. This suggests that if he'd had a freer hand the movie's romance might have inflicted on us a truly deplorable system of meaning. Something more like his critical fave of a few years ago Y tu mamá también.