It's been 18 months so Mr. Potter returns to the silver screen in his darkest, most psycholgical outing yet. Phoenix is a quite faithful book to film adaptation, though, needless to say some parts have been omitted. The casting is fantastic Imelda Staunton portrays an ecxellent Umbridge, exactly the way I imagind her in the book and Evanna Lynch truly does make you believe she's the ever dreamy Luna Lovegood. The fim's sole flaw is the script (it's the first Potter film not penned by Steve Cloves, and it shows) While I understand the need to condense some scenes into montages I felt the film breezed through some plot points a little too fast and at times failed to evoke a sense of a cohesive storyline. Events seem to happen one after another and not so much because of each other. Britain's finest actors have convened but characters like Lupin get but a few lines.

[SPOILER]Kreacher only appears for show but in the film he has no connection with the dark lord's grand scheme, the kids get way too fast into the department of Mysteries[/SPOILER] At 138mins Phoenix is pretty much the same lenth as Azkaban, but it's been the largest book to date. An extra 20 minutes might have done the film some good.

Now don't get me wrong this was a great film, especially the [SPOILER]final duel between Dumbledore and Voldemort[/SPOILER] was magnificently done. I also really liked the DA training sessions, Dobby's absence hurt, though. Dan, Emma and Rupert have really come into their own as actors especially Daniel had probably the most challenging part, performing Harry's confusion over being possessed by Voldemort.

Overall another great Potter film that was alittle too short, a little too fast for my taste.