Witches and wizards in their dowdiest Muggle clothing run screaming down muddied paths, their bloomers flapping on clotheslines while their flags burn in the wind. Harry ducks and rolls in the mud, nearly trampled by the frenzied mob, and then is swallowed by the crowd. Elsewhere, a spiked cage sits in the center of a round, columned chamber choked with paperwork and the musty feel of old courtrooms. A 30-foot, horned dragon haunches in wait. The Great Hall sparkles for the Ball, the Death Eaters are prowling in dark, pointed hoods and skeletal masks, the contingents from France and Bulgaria have made stunning entrances, Rita is buzzing, hormones are swinging, and at the mouth of a towering hedge maze, a hero screams over a young man's dead body.

The much-acclaimed internal drama of Prisoner of Azkaban has been supplanted with an external grandeur that expresses itself in a blaze of spectacles and terrors with a very political edge. Things have been cut, as we have expected them to be; those who were angry at Cuaron for slicing from Azkaban are going to have to try and come to peace now with the fact that there are even heavier cuts here - it had to be done.