Harry Potter Half-Blood Prince Reviews

Earlier this morning Joe from UK Rottentomatoes.com emailed about the collection of reviews they have on their website for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Hours later and a slew of reviews are still pouring in, with the movie “98% Fresh on the Tomatometer which makes it the freshest film of the franchise to date! Azkaban is in second place with 89%.” The consensus: “Dark, thrilling, and occasionally quite funny, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is also visually stunning and emotionally satisfying.”

While many are preparing to head off to a special midnight showing here in the States others have just seen the film, we do have a collection of recent reviews to pass along.

Entertainment Weekly:” Half-Blood Prince encompasses important plot developments involving both love and death. But the story is, still and all, only a pause, deferring an intensely anticipated conclusion. And it’s in that exquisite place of action and waiting that this elegantly balanced production emerges as a model adaptation. By now, as played with utmost loyalty to the cause by some of Britain’s most illustrious actors, the supporting characters are as familiar as the population of Homer Simpson’s neighborhood (and that’s a great compliment). Yet with a big assist from cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel — a Potter newbie who memorably shot Amélie and Across the Universe — the filmmakers have found a way to refresh our eyes and enhance our appreciation for this rich, amazing creation. A-
Salon: “By the series’ completion, Yates will have directed half of the “Harry Potter” movies, and that mutes the surprise element a bit. But “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” at least ensures that the franchise’s remaining movies are in good hands. Yates understands the bond, and the continuity, that’s so essential between the old and the young. In one of the movie’s loveliest scenes, Broadbent’s professor Slughorn, slightly sozzled, describes to Harry a piece of magic worked by one of his former students. He describes this wonderful, delicate feat so vividly that his words are more effective than visuals would be. And, as it turns out, this bit of magic had been worked by Harry’s long-dead mother, Lily. It was, Slughorn tells Harry, peering at him as if through mist, “the most beautiful magic.” That’s a measure of how subtle a spectacle Yates has given us with “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” The most beautiful magic in it is left unseen. And still, it emerges with absolute clarity.”
New York Times
“[Voldemort]in his early embodied form as Tom Riddle, by the excellent young actors Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Frank Dillane. There must be a factory where the British mint their acting royalty: Hero, who plays the dark lord as a spectrally pale, creepy child of 11, is Ralph Fiennes’s nephew, and Frank is the son of the terrific actor Stephen Dillane. The younger Mr. Dillane, who plays Voldemort at 16, conveys the seductiveness of evil with small, silky smiles he bestows like dangerous gifts on Jim Broadbent’s Horace Slughorn, a professor whose trembling jowls suggest a deeper tremulousness. When Slughorn, the fear almost visibly leaking from his body, shares the secret of immortality with Voldemort, you feel, much as when Ralph Fiennes raged through “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” in 2005, that something vital is at stake.”
USA Today “Captivating from the first frame, this Potter feels more epic than previous films, which had a less mature, more madcap quality. Yates finds an artful way to meld the teenage romance and inherent humor with a sense of impending doom.”
Roger Ebert “I admired this Harry Potter. It opens and closes well, and has wondrous art design and cinematography as always, only more so. “I’m just beginning to realize how beautiful this place is,” Harry sighs from a high turret. The middle passages spin their wheels somewhat, hurrying about to establish events and places not absolutely essential. But those scenes may be especially valued by devoted students of the Potter saga. They may also be the only ones who fully understand them; ordinary viewers may be excused for feeling baffled some of the time.”
LA Times:”Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is being described as an excursion into the dark side for this venerable series, but don’t let the chatter fool you. Now in its sixth episode shot over an eight-year span, with two more features still to come, this one-of-a-kind film cycle has become as comfortable and reliable as an old shoe, providing a degree of dependability that’s becoming increasingly rare.”
CBC : “As always, the terrific adult cast is relegated to the background. But even in small parts, they shine, particularly Carter as the unhinged Bellatrix, Broadbent as the shallow but ultimately sympathetic Slughorn and Alan Rickman, who speaks volumes with his pauses as the brooding Severus Snape. It’s Gambon’s Dumbledore, though, who steals the movie.”
CNN: “A trio of evenly spaced set-pieces do generate enough excitement to make this an iffy proposition for parents with younger kids; in particular Dumbledore and Harry’s climactic cave expedition is an intense, nightmarish standout.”
Associated Press: “Previous installments played out in a supernatural bubble bearing little connection to our ordinary little Muggle world. Half-Blood Prince brims with authentic people and honest interaction — hormonal teens bonding with great humor, heartache that will resonate with anyone who remembers the pangs of first love.”
Rolling Stone: “I’ll never tell why, except to say that it’s a pleasure to watch the mesmerizing Felton take the role to the next level, discovering a vulnerable humanity in Draco. And Rickman is a dynamo, lacing the Severus sneer with glimmers of conscience and moral doubt.”
The Age: “Diehard Potter fans may be willing to forgive and endure a boring film for the sake of a legacy they love — as did Star Wars fans with Phantom Menace — but those eager for entertainment will find Half-Blood Prince only marginally more watchable than that.” Source

The latest Harry Potter film made more than $100 million on its first day on worldwide release, distributor Warner Bros has announced.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth film in the fantasy series, opened in 20 countries on Wednesday, making $104m (£63.7m) in cinemas.

The movie performed particularly well in the UK, taking more than £4.7m ($7.6m) from 1,305 screens.

Only two other films have opened more strongly in the UK and Ireland.

Domestic box office takings for the sixth Potter movie topped the £3m made by the third outing in its first day in 2004.

‘Outstanding’

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban previously held the record for the most successful film to open in the UK on a Wednesday.

Half-Blood Prince took $58.2m (£35.7m) in the US and Canada – a tally that included a record $22.2m (£13.6m) from midnight screenings.

The only other movie to fare better from a Wednesday debut in North America is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which opened last month with a $62m (£38m) haul.

“These outstanding box office numbers are another testament to the universal appeal of JK Rowling’s stories,” said Veronika Kwan-Rubinek, Warner Bros president of international distribution.

“We owe this record-breaking opening to the remarkable fans who have stood by us and who stood in line to be among the first to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” added studio president Alan Horn. Source

Are we there yet? Well, not quite. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the latest big-screen iteration of the global phenomenon, is merely the sixth chapter in a now eight-part series that, much like its young hero, played by Daniel Radcliffe, has begun to show signs of stress around the edges, a bit of fatigue, or maybe that’s just my gnawing impatience. Not that the director, David Yates, doesn’t keep things moving and flying and soaring, his cameras slashing through the gloom that has settled onto this epic endeavor like a damp, enveloping fog and at times threatened to snuff out its joy as terminally as a soul-sucking Dementor.

That any sense of play and pleasure remains amid all the doom and the dust, the poisonous potions and murderous sentiments, is partly a testament to the remarkable sturdiness of this movie franchise, which has transformed in subtle and obvious fashion, changing in tandem with the sprouting bodies and slowly evolving personalities of its young, now teenage characters. The series is now almost as old (it took off in 2001) as Harry was when he started his journey, which found the orphan whisked after his 11th birthday from a cramped, tragic nook to Hogwarts, a school of witchcraft and wizardry in a parallel world teeming with wondrous creatures, including an embarrassment of lavishly talented British screen actors.

Surgically adapted by Steve Kloves, who has written all the screenplays save for No. 5, “The Half-Blood Prince” was to be the penultimate film, the corollary to the J. K. Rowling book. Instead, the concluding volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” has been deemed hefty enough by Warner Brothers — 784 hardcover pages, 2.4 pounds shipping weight, a fight to the death — to be split into two movies that will hit in late 2010 and summer 2011. Considering that the take for Harry Potter and His Big Pot of Cinematic Gold now totals almost $4.5 billion in international box office, the studio’s reluctance to embrace the end is touchingly obvious.

But, seriously, could we just get on with it? For at least one committed follower of the series, who closed the last chapter on Harry soon after “The Deathly Hallows” was published in 2007, the lag time between the final books and the movies has drained much of the urgency from this screen adaptation, which, far more than any of the previous films, comes across as an afterthought. Mr. Yates, who directed the last movie, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” which also arrived in summer 2007, does a fine job of keeping Ms. Rowling’s multiple parts in balanced play, nimbly shifting between the action and the adolescent soap operatics. Yet even with a surer directorial touch, he can’t keep the whole thing from feeling like filler.

Not that he doesn’t juice the material for all it’s worth, starting with some preliminary mayhem meant to signal that this isn’t your 10-year-old’s Harry Potter.

After a nod to the last movie’s big finish, with Harry bloodied but victorious, the new picture opens in London, where an office filled with nonmagical humans (Muggles, in Rowling-speak) are staring out the high-rise windows — as slack-jawed, presumably, as those filling theater seats — at sinister gray clouds surging in the sky. Suddenly three plumes of black smoke, Death Eaters in fast, fuming motion, cut through the moody overhead dome, race through the streets and wobble the pedestrian-only Millennium Bridge that slings across the Thames, snapping cables, fatally upending human bodies and further unnerving the wizardly world.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the story, well, there’s always Wikipedia. Although Mr. Kloves has done an admirable job tailoring Ms. Rowling’s progressively longer and baggier books, he or, perhaps more accurately, the series’s producers have not made many concessions for the uninitiated. If you have kept pace, you will grasp why Dumbledore (the invaluable Michael Gambon), the headmaster of Hogwarts, has placed so much trust in Harry, a callow student with prodigious wizard gifts and little discernable personality. The chosen one, Harry has been commissioned to destroy the too-little-seen evildoer Voldemort, a sluglike ghoul usually played by Ralph Fiennes (alas, seen only briefly this time out) and here played, in his early embodied form as Tom Riddle, by the excellent young actors Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Frank Dillane.

There must be a factory where the British mint their acting royalty: Hero, who plays the dark lord as a spectrally pale, creepy child of 11, is Ralph Fiennes’s nephew, and Frank is the son of the terrific actor Stephen Dillane (Thomas Jefferson in the HBO mini-series “John Adams”). The younger Mr. Dillane, who plays Voldemort at 16, conveys the seductiveness of evil with small, silky smiles he bestows like dangerous gifts on Jim Broadbent’s Horace Slughorn, a professor whose trembling jowls suggest a deeper tremulousness. When Slughorn, the fear almost visibly leaking from his body, shares the secret of immortality with Voldemort, you feel, much as when Ralph Fiennes raged through “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” in 2005, that something vital is at stake.

If that sense of exigency rarely materializes in “The Half-Blood Prince,” it’s partly because the series finale is both too close and too far away and partly because Mr. Radcliffe and his co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, as Harry’s friends Hermione and Ron, have grown up into three prettily manicured bores. Unlike the veterans, notably the sensational Alan Rickman, who invests his character, Prof. Severus Snape, with much-needed ambiguity, drawing each word out with exquisite luxury, bringing to mind a buzzard lazily pulling at entrails, Mr. Radcliffe in particular proves incapable of the most crucial cinematic magic. Namely the alchemical transformation of dialogue into something that feels like passion, something that feels real and true and makes you as wild for Harry as for all those enticingly dark forces.

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). The movie is more suggestively than overtly violent, though sometimes rather intense.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Opens on Wednesday nationwide.

Directed by David Yates; written by Steve Kloves, based on the book by J. K. Rowling; director of photography, Bruno Delbonnel; edited by Mark Day; music by Nicholas Hooper; production designer, Stuart Craig; visual effects supervisor, Tim Burke; make-up and creature effects design by Nick Dudman; produced by David Heyman and David Barron; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 33 minutes.

WITH: Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), Jim Broadbent (Professor Horace Slughorn), Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange), Robbie Coltrane (Rubeus Hagrid), Michael Gambon (Prof. Albus Dumbledore), Alan Rickman (Prof. Severus Snape), Maggie Smith (Minerva McGonagall), Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood), Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley), Jessie Cave (Lavender Brown), Hero Fiennes Tiffin (Tom Riddle, age 11) and Frank Dillane (teenage Tom Riddle).

Correction: July 16, 2009

A picture caption on Wednesday with a film review of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” misstated the surname of the author of the Harry Potter books. She is J. K. Rowling, not Rowlings. The review also misstated the timing of Harry’s first trip to the Hogwarts School. It is after he turns 11, not on the eve of his 11th birthday.

Hackers are using the promise of a ‘Half-Blood Prince’ bootleg to lure fans and steal info.

Harry Potter’s latest cinematic adventure is already breaking box-office records, as the boy wizard encounters murder, betrayal and heartbreak at a theater near you. But a very different danger is plaguing his fans in cyberspace — where hackers are using the blockbuster to cast a spell on computers worldwide.

“It’s definitely the most targeted film that we’ve seen,” explained Michael Greene, VP of Product Strategy at PC Tools, whose virus fighters have been hard at work battling “Harry Potter hackers” over the last few weeks. “This is pretty scary stuff.”

Here’s how it works: These days, millions of people are searching the Web for info on “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” which is certain to become the #1 film in the country. Knowing this, cybercriminals are using search optimization tactics to target popular sites like Digg.com with headlines like “Watch ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ online free!” and comment posts filled with related keywords to attract Google. Seeing professional-looking images from the film, Potter fans are convinced that the movie is one click away — but as they keep clicking, a virus is being installed on their computers.

“A couple of weeks ago I started to notice it; there was a Digg post about viewing the new ‘Harry Potter’ movie in advance,” Greene explained. “It tells you to download a video player — which is actually pretty common — if you watch a Flash movie or don’t have the right software. But in this case, you’re not getting a Flash plug-in or anything like that — what you’re getting is the malware of the day.

“At that point, your computer has been infected,” he added. “And even worse, you don’t get to see the ‘Harry Potter’ movie.”

The reason it’s particularly scary is that these virus downloads are brazenly creeping onto legitimate Web sites — and teasing a largely youth-oriented fanbase with the forbidden fruit of a free, legal download. “In the old days, people would go to gambling sites or pornography sites and get infected — the dark underbelly of the Internet,” Greene said of the new hackers. “Viruses and malware would just trash your computer, and you might lose some data. Nowadays, it’s a lot worse than that.”

The Potter virus is categorized as crimeware, which searches your computer for credit card or bank information, Greene said. “[The hackers] will collect credit card details, social security numbers. Then they’ll turn around and sell that to another group, a ‘carding operation’ they call it, and these guys will buy blank credit cards from a third group; they’ll put them together, print out the credit cards and then sell physical credit cards with your numbers on the street.”

The lesson, Greene explained, is a basic one: If you want to see “Half-Blood Prince,” pay 10 bucks and get yourself to a movie theater. And if you’re one of the many who’ve already attempted to download something too good to be true — get yourself a good antivirus program and begin cleaning up your computer, immediately.

“As long as there is money to be made, havoc to be created, there will be Voldemorts out there,” Greene joked, comparing the Harry Potter hackers to the boy wizard’s evil nemesis. “To keep Hogwarts running, we have to train the magicians to keep themselves safe.” Source

“Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince” conjured up $22.2 million in midnight ticket sales at 3,003 locations, according to Warner Bros., putting the popular boy-wizard movie on track for a record-breaking debut today and through the weekend.

The sixth “Potter” film, which cost more than $400 million to make, market and release worldwide, shattered the $18.5-million-record midnight earnings of last year’s Batman blockbuster “The Dark Knight,” also produced and distributed by Warner Bros.

“Half-Blood Prince” could very well beat the all-time domestic record for Wednesday ticket sales of $62 million generated last month by Paramount Pictures’ “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and could eclipse its five-day Wednesday-through-Sunday record of $200.1 million.

It’s also possible that the latest “Potter” could topple the $203.7-million all-time five-day record set by “Dark Knight,” which opened on a Friday.

“Half-Blood Prince,” unlike the last two “Potter” films, is rated PG rather than PG-13, meaning it could play to an even broader audience. The first three movies also were rated PG.

The movie is expected to gross more domestically than its predecessor, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” which two years ago sold $292 million in tickets. The film grossed more than twice that amount overseas with $646.2 million.

“Half-Blood Prince” will debut this week in all major international territories.

– Claudia Eller and Ben Fritz Source

Harry Potter’s sixth year at Hogwarts turns out to be quite the exciting year. First off is the arrival of a new teacher at Hogwarts, Horace Slughorn, who is a bit more useful to Harry than he realizes. Next, Harry obtains a Potions book which used to belong to the very mysterious Half-Blood Prince. Harry finds that the Half-Blood Prince’s ancient scribbles are written along the margins of almost every page, giving Harry advice on how to improve greatly on his Potions work, and also teaching him a few helpful (and dangerous) spells along the way. Amidst this, Harry is starting private lessons with Professor Dumbledore, during which Harry learns the dark secrets of Voldemort’s past, hoping that they could use these secrets to find a way to defeat him. Harry’s year gets even more stressful with the suspicious actions of Draco Malfoy, who has been sneaking around the school doing, so Harry assumes, Voldemort’s bidding. Harry quickly becomes determined, and slightly obsessed, to find out exactly what Malfoy has been up to and putting an end to it. Yet, during this time, Harry and his friends go through daily life, busy with school work, Quidditch (in which Harry has been made captain of the team), and, of course, romance. Ron has found a new girlfriend, Lavender Brown, a perky (if not obnoxious) Gryffindor student, and Hermione is not happy about it. Ron and Hermione’s friendship takes a toll throughout the school year and Harry, as usual, is stuck in the middle. Harry, meanwhile, is facing a romantic dilemma of his own: he realizes he is falling for his best friend’s sister, Ginny Weasley, who is unfortunately dating Harry’s classmate, Dean Thomas. Harry’s pining for Ginny and Ron’s hilarious relationship with Lavender give this story a large dose of reality. Throughout all the school drama, however, the obvious darkness of Voldemort’s impending rise to power is always apparent. The incredible action-packed climax is sure to leave the audience stunned and, inevitably, prove that you shouldn’t trust everybody who you think is good and also prove that not everyone can manage to survive. -ceeotters

Emboldened by the return of Lord Voldemort, the Death Eaters are wreaking havoc in both the Muggle and wizarding worlds and Hogwarts is no longer the safe haven it once was. Harry suspects that new dangers may lie within the castle, but Dumbledore is more intent upon preparing him for the final battle that he knows is fast approaching. He needs Harry to help him uncover a vital key to unlocking Voldemort’s defenses critical information known only to Hogwarts’ former Potions Professor, Horace Slughorn. With that in mind, Dumbledore manipulates his old colleague into returning to his previous post with promises of more money, a bigger office and the chance to teach the famous Harry Potter. Meanwhile, the students are under attack from a very different adversary as teenage hormones rage across the ramparts. Harry’s long friendship with Ginny Weasley is growing into something deeper, but standing in the way is Ginny’s boyfriend, Dean Thomas, not to mention her big brother Ron. But Ron’s got romantic entanglements of his own to worry about, with Lavender Brown lavishing her affections on him, leaving Hermione simmering with jealousy yet determined not to show her feelings. And then a box of love potion-laced chocolates ends up in the wrong hands and changes everything. As romance blossoms, one student remains aloof with far more important matters on his mind. He is determined to make his mark, albeit a dark one. Love is in the air, but tragedy lies ahead and Hogwarts may never be the same again.