THE GOOD NEWS is that at no point during Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban do Harry and Ron head out to the Hogwarts swimming pool.

Worries about the selection of Alfonso Cuarón to direct the third Harry Potter movie were needless. While Cuarón was an odd choice–his most notable previous work was the randy and overpraised Y tu mamá también–the executives at Warner Bros. have broken him in. To such a degree, in fact, that for two-thirds of the movie you might think that Christopher Columbus was still behind the camera.