I have a dirty confession to make. I’m a professional film critic and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth film in a franchise whose five efforts thus far have raked in a combined $3.5 billion domestically, is the first film in the series that I’ve seen. This is irresponsible to some and baffling to most, but I find it rather amusing.



When the first movie came out, in November of 2001, I was the editor-in-chief and principal film critic of a now-defunct weekly entertainment paper here in Los Angeles, so I had my pick of the litter with regards to assignments. The thing was, I wasn’t necessarily as excited about Harry Potter as the general populace. I’d heard good things about the books (even a thumbs up from my mom), but hadn’t read any of them; given that my regular job indulged such high amounts of escapist fiction, any time I had left for reading invariably was devoted to biographies or something of the sort, so I could feel like I wasn’t completely rotting my brain

The paper where I worked wasn’t invited to the film’s out-of-town junket (in London), and I believe I had another, admittedly nominal conflict the evening of the announced screening I first heard about from a Warner Bros. publicist. So I passed the movie along to one of my fine and more than grateful freelancers; I think I reviewed Steve Martin's Novocaine, Snoop Dogg’s The Wash, and the indies Maze and The Fluffer that week, four films which collectively opened on less than a quarter of the screens that Harry Potter did.

I followed with interest the intriguing choices of director for the series, and some of the other gossip, but never really felt like I was missing out. If anything, I thought fondly of a day 20 years hence, just settling down one weekend with a stack of DVDs (or whatever form of newfangled home exhibition was all the rage at that time) and plowing through them all, my own little discovered pop cultural time capsule. But now I've gone and ruined that a bit. And all in all, I have to say, I enjoyed the movie just fine.

It’s not as bewildering of an experience as you might think, actually, wandering into a series completely cold. You’re probably able to appreciate certain things a bit more — certainly there’s no irrational attachment to the novels’ exposition or detail in setting. I had no strong previous connection to the material, but was carried along by the film’s rather savvy balance of wonderment with a sense of impending doom and mystery. Coming out of The Order of the Phoenix, I can understand and more fully appreciate the series’ appeal, even without the same sum-total hourly commitment of shared darkness. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.