My Prisoner of Azkaban thoughts ** SPOILERS **

I went to see Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban on Monday night. Visually it was a very impressive film, ahead of the previous two movies. The effects were stunning, especially the dementors which worked really well. The acting was better with the three leads integrating much tighter than before. The film packs an awful lot into it, perhaps a little too much for the time allowed. I would have happily watched for a further 30 minutes if it meant explaining the plot points better. The first two films stuck rigidly to the canon where as this one re-arranges things a little more. I was probably more acutely aware of this as I re-read POA recently. Quite a few scenes which I consider to be quite important (and having read the subsequent books I know what's important and what's not) were left out, which might require a bit of catch up in the next movie. (Honestly I don't see how they can do GoF in one film at all) The character of Remus Lupin was introduced far too quickly and his relationship with Harry just seems to appear from out of nowhere. For some reason Lupin gets Harry to face the boggart in the DADA class, which doesn't happen in the book, hence Lupin's introduction is a little disjoint. (Though I loved him putting on the gramophone and letting the class go after the boggart) Gary Oldman plays Sirius really well, but isn't given the screen time he deserves. It was good to see some of the madness in Sirius that's not throughly described in the book. It would have been good to have had the relationship between James, Remus, Sirius and Pettigrew described a little better, as it is we're not even told who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs are. Alan Rickman's performance is spot as as Snape, though again he isn't given the screen time he really should have. A major disappointment was the way Draco Malfoy was used, protraying him more as a brutish bully, who cries as soon as someone stands up to him, rather than the schemeing Slytherin we all know him to be. Lucius Malfoy doesn't make an appearance at all. The Quidditch match is rather short, but certainly intense and the match against Slytherin is cut completely, which is a pity as I was looking forward to it.
In conclusion, it's a great film and defintly worth watching. Prisoner of Azkaban has more going on that the first two books, and it's a much harder story to compress down into the timescale of a movie. I would have adapted it a bit differently to the way that it was done, but then my movie would probably have been 6 hours long too :)