Harry Potter has kept his fans waiting for two years, the longest school break they have had to endure for a new movie adventure about the teen wizard.
It's been worth the wait.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the franchise's best so far, blending rich drama and easy camaraderie among the actors with the visual spectacle that until now has been the real star of the series.
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The hocus-pocus of it all nearly takes a back seat to the story and characters this time, and the film is the better for that. It doesn't skimp on the Quidditch action, sorcery duels or occult pyrotechnics, but those are simply part of the show, not the main attraction.
Previous installments played out in a supernatural bubble bearing little connection to our ordinary little Muggle world. Half-Blood Prince brims with authentic people and honest interaction, hormonal teens bonding with great humour, heartache that will resonate with anyone who remembers the pangs of first love.
Drop the magic act, and Hogwarts could be any school of self-absorbed geeks, jocks, popular kids and outcasts trying to manoeuver through the day.
Half-Blood Prince escalates the peril for Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his best pals, Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), while giving the threesome that first collaborated as prepubescent kids their best platform yet to show their maturing acting chops.
Harry's big challenge this school year is a clandestine assignment by Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), who enlists his protege to retrieve a critical memory that new Professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) possesses about young Tom Riddle, the future dark Lord Voldemort.
Broadbent gives the best performance mingling a cock-of-the-walk flamboyance with the deep melancholy of a teacher bearing the shame of disappointment in both himself and a star pupil gone bad.
The usual teen high jinks and crises lighten the story with plenty of laughs. Romantic entanglements, which have gradually preoccupied Harry, Hermione, Ron and other classmates as they stumbled into puberty, burst out like a wicked case of acne this year.
Ron is dating bubble-headed bimbo Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave), putting Hermione into a jealous snit. Harry's got his own love triangle, falling for Ron's sister, Ginny (Bonnie Wright), who's dating another student.
Along with a romantic rival, Harry has a more dangerous foe in Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), his bullying tormentor, now a torn and troubled youth himself as an agent of Voldemort.
Whether Radcliffe, Watson and Grint's acting careers flourish after Harry Potter or not, they have left an impressive little body of work with these three characters alone, developing them into full-blooded youths that feel real despite their fantastical surroundings.
