Plenty of women read Twilight because it transports them back to their schooldays. Harry Potter works in a similar way, but rarely more so for your correspondent than in The Half Blood Prince, a full-throated recreation of the penultimate book.
What it really succeeds in recreating is the sixth form – petty jealousies, posturing, unspoken crushes, doomed relationships that seem destined to last forever – that sense of cockiness that flows from being the biggest fish in the pool. The mix of personalities is dead on without being stereotypical. There was even a comedy junkie moment – look at the bit where Harry downs his luck potion and deny that the performance was informed by Trainspotting, Human Traffic, or its ilk.
Draco Malfoy, meanwhile, dresses like a character out of the Matrix and sneers like Dickie Attenborough’s gangster in Brighton Rock. Especially around him, the cinematography is spectacular; like Withnail & I, much of the framing is painterly, the use of light and shadow recalls film noir (again, Brighton Rock), and the mood often drifts into horror. As a blend of so much it can feel like a mishmash, but a genuine sense of camaraderie from the central trio carries it to an end that is necessarily unsatisfactory. Bring on the final two.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 