Order of the Phoenix is a sombre and at times curiously sober movie

Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix
STARRING: Daniel Radcliffe,   Rupert Grint, Emma Watson
DIRECTOR: David Yates
138 mins

Quite rightly, museum curators believe that few visitors now recognise stories from classical mythology.
So to make art galleries user-friendly they place cards beside Old Master paintings, explaining their iconography and significance. Popular big-budget movies, however, make no such concessions. When you see the second or third episode of the Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and the Star Wars series, you’re expected to be as familiar with their newly confected mythology as earlier generations were with the Wedding at Cana or Zeus’s seduction of Europa.
Thus the fifth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, directed by David Yates, hitherto best-known for his distinguished work for British TV, and scripted by an American, Michael Goldenberg, who wrote the mystical SF movie Contact, begins in medias res, or more precisely in Little Whinging, Surrey. (There is, no doubt, a thesis being written called ‘From Pooter to Potter: Suburban Life in British Literature’.)
Our wand-waving hero, now 16, still wearing his old-fashioned spectacles and with a six-o’clock shadow as noticeable as that of the teenage Richard Nixon, is spending another dreary holiday with his ghastly petit-bourgeois uncle and aunt, the Dursleys.
In the first frame he’s confronting a gang of bullies led by the Dursleys’ obese son when suddenly there’s a storm.
Sheltering in a culvert, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) resorts to magic to save himself and his cousin from wraith-like creatures that threaten to suck the spirits from their bodies.
This is a pretty frightening sequence, and the creatures we’re expected to recognise as Dementors are presumably working for the film’s ultimate villain, Lord Voldemort (ie ‘flight of death’), J K Rowling’s equivalent of Satan and Darth Vader.
We are also supposed to know that Harry has broken one of the cardinal rules of the novice wizard – that he should never practise witchcraft outside the precincts of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry or in the presence of ‘Muggles’, which is to say the rest of us, unendowed with magical abilities.
Meanwhile, on a lighter note, Harry is smitten by a beautiful Chinese student, and they kiss under magical mistletoe. And the kids sit for their OWL (Ordinary Wizard Level) examinations, which exclude all those dreary subjects that Muggles study.
But in general this is a sombre and at times curiously sober movie, handsomely designed as always, atmospherically lit and confidently performed, though the major adult characters take a back seat in the common room to Imelda Staunton.

By Philip French