Just wild about Harry

Children will be thrilled, if a little baffled, by the third instalment in the Potter saga. The feisty and elaborate film should keep accompanying adults awake, at least, too.

The Prisoner of Azkaban opens in suburbia. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), now 13, is spending his holidays with the dreaded Dursleys. When a fat Aunt pitches up for lunch and gobbles all the lamb shank, the young wizard freaks out and turns his junior magic on her, blowing her up to the size of a monstrous balloon (at a certain size she looks rather like Gordon Brown) and letting her out of the patio window to float above the streets, moaning.

Moments later, Harry rushes from the house with his suitcase and immediately boards a huge purple bus filled with chandeliers and sleeping magicians that whisks him to a pub where Ian Brown - the ex-frontman of the Stone Roses - is having a pint (is this in the book?).

The camera pans past Brown, up the mullioned stairs, and into a mahogany room in which Robert Hardy (Minister of Magic) is stirring some pea soup and wearing an incredibly well-pressed suit. If you're not hooked by this point, you're just being greedy.

Hardy sends Harry back to Hogwarts School, where Gary Oldman is on the rampage, hiding in the cellars and ramparts, playing a dangerous wizard called Sirius Black who wants to kill Potter. When Harry is reunited with Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) they turn to the soft David Thewlis, the new Defence Against the Dark Arts tutor, for help.

Other days, Emma Thompson's Professor Trelawney reads tea leaves and auras and has the best lines. Says she, of the increasingly slappable Hermione, "Your soul is as dry as the pages of the books to which you so desperately cleave."

There are tremendous scenes of bats rising from the forest, as though pouring from Industrial Revolution chimneys; of Harry and Hermione looking at a misting tawny dusk; and of a stag with its great, grave eyes, his head as rigid as a statue.

ELSEWHERE Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, Michael Gambon, Julie Walters and Timothy Spall appear as various new or established Hogwartian characters being terribly deft and sparky - like celebs at some fancy-dress benefit, sweeping about shaking people's hands.

There is something else new in The Prisoner of Azkaban: this Potter is unusually intense and offers pain along with the thrills. Radcliffe is now old enough to get Harry's hang-ups over convincingly and the actor looks like a trainee neurotic.

And this time Hogwarts, full to the brim with burgeoning adolescents, feels like a place of doomsday loneliness. The school is haunted by creatures called Dementors, who suck all joy from the souls of their prey. Even the usually chipper Ron is having bad dreams.