Helena Bonham Carter in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," Warner Bros. Pictures, 2009

From Bambi's mother's death to the destruction of Alderaan, every modern generation is cursed and blessed with its very own big-screen traumas. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth film in the series based on J.K. Rowling's fantasy novels, contains a doozy; that millions of readers know it's coming won't dim its power in the least. Screenwriter Steve Kloves, director David Yates and the familiar, still-sturdy cast play the grim moment and its aftermath for incredulous shock rather than raw sentiment, knowing viewers will supply the latter in spades.

As devotees know, this entry finds Hogwarts in a funk, its faculty and students still reeling from the death of Harry's godfather and the "I am your father, Luke"-level revelation that the hero is, in fact, The Chosen One. Headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) interrupts Harry's holiday-among-the-common folks (even wand-blocking his flirtation with a star-struck coffee shop waitress) to whisk him across England and introduce him to a soon-to-be faculty member, potions professor Professor Slughorn (Jim Broadbent, a master of scatterbrained enthusiasm and matter-of-fact venality who gives both modes a workout here). Slughorn once mentored a student named Tom Riddle, who would one day evolve into the dreaded Voldemort; then he tinkered with his (and the school's) memories of that time, depriving our heroes of opposition research required to vanquish evil.

Dumbledore aims to place Harry under Slughorn's wing -- a double-agent scenario. Harry is game even though the plan's a lot to ask of anybody, especially a depressive, hormone-addled teenager. The hero's peers are as dazed and confused as he is; as the central plot unfurls through the movie like an immense, poisonous snake, revealed tail-first, the filmmakers set up and pay off secondary stories: the love troubles of Harry, Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), the jealous scheming of Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton, who increasingly looks like he could be David Hemmings' long-lost rotter of a son). Understandably, some characters get short shrift. Evanna Lynch's kooky Luna Lovegood, who stole all her scenes in the last movie, gets only a couple of choice moments in this one, and I would have liked to have seen more from Alan Rickman's Snape, who's as cranky and droll as he is malignant and tortured. (Savor how this great actor delivers the simple line, "You just....know." You could bake a pie in that ellipsis!)

But thanks to Kloves' and Yates' knack for compression and their frequently deft cross-cutting, this dense and deliberately slow film never feels overstuffed, and it never settles for being a parade of lavish bits. It coheres and hardens as it goes along; it's a popcorn fugue. The remarkable opening image -- the most unexpected creative choice in the movie -- is a slow-motion shot of Harry facing an emblematic, expectant crowd, trying not to flinch against a volley of Scorsese-style assaultive flashbulbs. The remainder of "The Half-Blood Prince" never rises to that glorious, near-pulp level. Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel ("A Very Long Engagement") favors muted colors, borderline-Rembrandt lighting and extremely shallow planes of focus (a faddish choice that sometimes seems cell-phone-commercial slick rather than dramatically defensible; I'm not convinced, for instance, that close-ups of important documents should be photographed with most of their words blurred out).

But the movie never quite falters, either; it settles into an appropriately gloomy vibe early, then sinks deeper and deeper into it. The heroes are so spiritually battered that they struggle to muster the energy necessary to carry on a simple conversation; in circumstances this dire, every exchange, no matter how fleeting, requires heroic concentration. Like "The Order of the Phoenix," only more so, this one strives for gravitas, aiming to be "The Godfather" with wands and broomsticks. Muted conversations unfold slowly, with foggy line deliveries and tactically vague expressions intended to misdirect the viewer or conceal true motives -- the better to put us in the position of Harry and his allies, goodhearted characters so exhausted by treachery that they don't know what to believe or whom to trust. "The Half-Blood Prince" isn't a note-perfect, deep-shallow blockbuster like "The Prisoner of Azkaban" or "The Order of the Phoenix" (both of which struck me as the only entries in the franchise that could succeed as movies on their own terms, without the viewer having seen the other films or read the novels). But it's the most wrenching of the six films -- the stuff nightmares are made of.

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Jack

Rupert Grint is Ron Weasley, you daft twit. Oliver Phelps is George Weasley.

pammmmy

I reckon the movie was amazing.

MZS

Very English chastisement, Jack! Thanks!

Dan

Was wondering if you have seen 24/7 and Room For Romeo Brass? Looking forward to this one as the sudden/shocking act of violence (which has been effective) in Meadows films was starting to wear on me a little. He seems to have such ease with telling observational stories I was hoping for a more restrained story for him to tell.

MZS

Dan: Of Meadows' films, I've seen "A Room for Romeo Brass" and "This is England,' but not "24/7" (though I've had it recommended to me by a number of people and keep meaning to get to it. "Somers Town" is not in the same wavelength as the director's other work -- emotionally, I mean; the technique is basically from the same wheelhouse, a kind of controlled naturalism without too many self-aware flourishes. I love "Somers Town" and recommend it to pretty much anybody who likes movies about friendship, or people-watching. It's also an excellent family film for adults and slightly mature children aged 11 and up (I'm a parent of one, and I'm going to take her to see "Somers Town" ASAP). And now that I think of it, in some ways it plays like the sweet little brother of "Romeo Brass," which is a much darker film about young friendship.

Noah

An “ellipse” is an oval. The word you were looking for, to refer to the punctuation mark comprised of three periods, is “ellipsis.”