Rapid Review - Movie Night

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: I haven't been overall impressed with the movie adaptations of the Harry Potter books. They aren't awful, but they compress the stories enough to be annoying. So I really wasn't expecting all that much from the third movie. And I got about what I was expecting. The "character" of Hogwarts itself was much better in this movie than in previous ones, with Hagrid's hut actually being out of the way and down near the woods, as described in the books. The landscape matched what I imagined when I first read the books better than the first two movies. The characters were as good as ever, but the story itself was compressed as usual to fit it into a movie. I dread the movie of the next book. I'm still waiting for the definitive mini-series to be made in a couple of decades. In the meantime, this was ok. Nothing special.