Heavy is the crown...

"Kids’ stuff is a thing of the past in Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. Suddenly looking quite grown up, the students at Hogwarts are forced to grapple with heavy issues of mortality, memory and loss in this sixth installment in the series of bigscreen adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s Potter tales. Dazzlingly well made and perhaps deliberately less fanciful than the previous entries, this one is played in a mode closer to palpable life-or-death drama than any of the others and is quite effective as such. Delayed by Warner Bros. from a late 2008 release date so as to spread the wealth after The Dark Knight scored so mightily last summer, this Prince is poised to follow its predecessors as one of the year’s two or three top-earning films." So writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.