Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix by James Ellaby

So far, each new Harry Potter film has been an improvement on the last one, with Mike Newell's Goblet Of Fire taking the series into an increasingly dark and mature direction. However, The Order Of The Phoenix is based on the longest book of them all and for the first time, it hasn't been adapted by scriptwriter David Kloves, while director David Yates comes from TV rather than having an established film pedigree like Chris Colombus, Alfonso Cuaron and Newell. Can he and writer Michael Goldenberg keep the series on track?

Only just. In terms of the look and feel of a Potter film, they pretty much direct themselves, and by this stage there are so many familiar faces and characters that returning to Hogwarts is like visiting your favourite auntie's house. One thing Goldenberg and Yates manage well is avoiding the sense of deja vu that the formulaic nature of the stories could have, and while at times it feels a little too much like 'just another year at Hogwarts', the film doesn't focus too much on the same old cliches of school life.

One of things that helps in that respect is that so much is changing there, not least with the introduction of ANOTHER Darks Arts teacher, Delores Umbrage, brilliantly portrayed by Imelda Staunton. With her Sybil Fawlty hair, her office full of decorative plates with (moving) kittens on them and her Daily Mail-reading passive aggressive authoritarian approach to teaching, she soon stirs things up and gets to dishing out edict after edict banning magic, kissing and pretty much everything else. In Staunton's capable hands she is a delightful baddie, a real teacher from hell.

Unfortunately, she dominates proceedings so utterly at the school that we hardly see any of the other teachers, with Professor McGonagall and Hagrid hardly getting any screen-time at all. This is symptomatic of a film overburdened with major characters but focusing even more than any of the others in the series on Harry. Even Hermione and Ron are pushed to the background most of the time, which takes a lot of the heart and the humour of things, as well as not giving their characters any room for development, something that had been key to the previous films.

Fortunately, Daniel Radcliffe has grown a lot as an actor (not just in size), so he can carry the weight of this film on his shoulders, which is considerably less than poor Harry has to carry. Having faced off against Voldemort in the last film, his entire life is now one long sense of foreboding, with dark and scary visions of the noseless one haunting his dreams. And then there's his love life, with this film seeing him KISS A GIRL! Bizarrely though, this plot-line is then almost entirely abandoned and has no resolution, which does seem rather odd.

But when you consider that this is the shortest film in the series, based on the longest book in the series, it's not surprising that it sometimes seems to rush through things. It's not helped by the fact that the story itself is a bit vague, with JK Rowling seemingly having already worked out by this stage where the series was going to come to a climax, leaving The Order Of The Phoenix feeling more like a chapter in a long story than a self-contained film, more so than its predecessors. Certainly you need to have seen them all to know what the heck is going on here, and even then you still to occasionally strain to remember who certain characters are.

This is even more the case with the children, who are all looking so old now, which must be a concern for the film-makers with two more movies still to make. The Weasley twins play a major comic relief role here, but are both into their 20s now and look decidedly out of place, while other characters like Draco Malfoy (who is hardly seen) and Neville Longbottom have changed a lot since the first film. Of course, they have all improved as actors as well, which has certainly helped the series develop in terms of quality, and while The Order Of The Phoenix is more of a sideways step than a progression, the Harry Potter franchise is still in excellent health.