| This book adaptation of a movie was just plain a loss. People who have read the book will be annoyed at the bizarre choice of what to include and what to leave out, and people who haven't read the book will just get confused. The list of who and what was left out entirely looks like the answer to a bizarre trivia question: Mrs. Weasley and Percy Weasley, the house elves, Harry's aunt and uncle (and in fact the entirety of Privet Drive), Sirius Black (I don't count 20 seconds of face-in-the-flame as worth counting), the entirety of the actual International Quiddich match and the party afterward, and three of the four dragons from the first Tri-Wizard Cup event. Rita Skeeter makes her appearance, but then is mysteriously never heard from after the Yule Ball. And worst of all, they totally bollox the ending by extending the Harry-Mad Eye Moody bit and then totally cutting it off, so we don't get anything of the explanation of why, plus to make things worse we don't even get the crucial Dumbledore-Fudge argument that sets up the whole next two years! The entire movie seems like a 4-hour movie that was brutally cut down into 2 hours 20 minutes when it could have been a good 3-hour or slightly more than 3 hour movie. The movie compared to what it could have been is almost comparingly bad to the 90-minute vs. the 140-minute versions of _Brazil_.
In other words, you'll probably need to see this one in order to understand movie 5, but you're going to need to break down and read the books if you haven't already if you want to continue to make sense of this series. Up through the 3rd movie this wasn't necessary but the curse of the 4th movie has struck this one. I just hope that 5 is a better movie.
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