Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Review

Newell is the first British director in the run and he brings a boarding school comedy sensibility that pays off in the middle stretch. The Yule Ball is awkward in exactly the right way, the boys are miserable in dress robes, and adolescence lands harder than any dragon. The tournament tasks are staged as three real action sequences, the dragon chase across the rooftops being the most kinetic thing in the series to that point.

Then the graveyard arrives and the register changes completely, Ralph Fiennes stepping out of the cauldron as something reptilian and delighted, Cedric killed in a throwaway second that still shocks. The cost of all this is the book. The house elf subplot, the political machinery, the reason anyone would enter a lethal contest at all, and most of Barty Crouch's scheme are compressed to the point of nonsense, so the film asks you to accept that a man spent a year in disguise to arrange a portkey he could have handed over in September.

Brendan Gleeson plays Moody with such gleeful physicality that the reveal costs more than it delivers. Enormously entertaining, structurally a mess, and the exact moment the series stopped being able to fit.