New Movie Shorts

HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN

Like its protagonist, the Harry Potter series is showing its first signs of adulthood. Replacing the lumbering Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuarõn (Y tu mamá también, A Little Princess) would seem to have more freedom in the movie's details than its overall direction. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) has been almost distractingly spruced up; Hermione (Emma Watson) looks like she's just studying magic until that job at Banana opens up. There's no fixing the book's distinctly uncinematic climax (essentially a bunch of people talking in a room), but for the first time, the movie's characters feel as real as J.K. Rowling's. The first two installments were inert lumps, but Azkaban feels like a movie -- as a fuming Harry drags his trunk along Privet Drive, I swore I caught a flash of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows. It's doubtful any of the HP movies will turn out to be deathless art (one can only dread what lightweight Mike Newell will make of the masterful Goblet of Fire), but at least Cuarõn doesn't make you feel like you've wasted your time. --Sam Adams (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

STRAYED

André Téchiné's quietly intense drama is a Grimm's fairy tale in reverse: Emmanuelle Béart and her two children take refuge from WWII in a house in the woods, where personal dramas overwhelm political ones. It's June 1940, and Béart and les gosses scour the French countryside, looking for a place to hide from the rapidly advancing Nazis. Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel), a taciturn but worldly young man whose jailbird past is obvious long before it's explicitly revealed, takes them provisionally under his wing, but Béart remains suspicious. The social and sexual tension (Téchiné's specialty) mounts, but somehow the whole feels distended, less prepossessing than it should be. --S.A.

(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)