A boy's room in a middle-class home. The boy is sitting up under the covers, and a light emanates from underneath. It's a timeless image, redolent with memories of reading a forbidden book, or just one you couldn't put down, or listening to Jean Shepherd after lights-out. But the boy in this room is different, as we see when the camera allows us into the inner sanctum of his tent, and see that while he's reading a book like so many other boys have done, it is a book that would be forbidden in 48% of American homes. For this is a book on divination, and the boy is practicing with his wand. Yes, the boy is Harry Potter, the sexual metaphor is absolutely intentional on the part of director Alfonso Cuarón, and he immediately puts on on notice that there's a new sheriff in town. Right from the get-go, it's clear that it's the director who brought us Y Tu Mamá También at the helm of HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN.

The first two Harry Potter films were competently crafted, but rarely inspiring, adaptations of works that for their devoted audience, posted the same Mantle of Crushing Responsibility that Peter Jackson faced in adapting the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here, all of the classic archetypes and metaphorical power of J.K. Rowling's books about a talented, yet reluctant orphaned young wizard, are allowed to play out in a breathtakingly beautiful film that finally allows the Harry Potter mythos to come into its own.

If the Pottermania of recent years, which gave geeky kids a protagonist who seemed so much like them, has subsided a bit as the first generation of Potter kids has inevitably moved on to other things, the grounding of the Potter story has allowed Cuarón and screenwriter Steve Kloves to move this story and its character into the realm of great fantasy/adventure stories. In being no longer required to slavishly translate Rowling's books word-for-word to the screen, Cuarón is free to explore some of the larger themes in Harry Potter's story that were largely sacrificed in the earlier films in favor of sumptuous, sugary, kid-friendly "Every Day is Christmas" scenes that largely involved all the candy a kid could possibly want.

Even aside from the obviously jokey setting of its opening, it's clear that Cuaron's mission in this film is to explore more deeply Harry's angst over his unknown parents. The vehicle of this exploration is one Sirius Black (shown in live news photographs right out of Minority Report), who has escaped the wizard's prison at Azkaban, and is now in pursuit of young Harry as part of a wider theme of the transition from childhood to adolescence. And who better to frame this tale, which involves two boys and a girl, than the very director who followed the journey of two Mexican boys to manhood accompanied by a worldier woman.

There's no escaping the fact that Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) are no longer children. The boys' voices have changed, Grint's clownish moonface has thankfully begun to take on an angularity which hints that if he just hangs on long enough, he'll stop looking like a human cartoon character, and there seems to be a certain something brewing between Ron and Hermione that's still so far under the surface even they aren't even aware of it yet. Cuaron shows us the effects of these changes so subtly that the kid-audience that Warner Bros. believes is the target audience for this film probably won't even notice it.

Don't believe what you've read about young Daniel Radcliffe having reached his limits as an actor. In a wonderful sequence early in the film, Radcliffe as Harry sullenly saunters around the house when no one's looking like any teenager would whose parents were murdered and who's being raised as a male Cinderella by insufferable relatives. But when Uncle Vernon's sister Marge appears for dinner, Radcliffe's shoulders hunch forward, his head bows, and he reverts to the meek persona he used to employ as a survival mechanism. The problem is, Harry is now an adolescence, and in a scene evocative of Brian DePalma's Carrie, raging hormones manifest as telekinesis in a metaphorical demonstration of the inability of teenagers to control or even harness their own growing powers to a positive end. Radcliffe does some sensational physical acting in this scene in which he first begins to stand up for himself.

One of the most interesting aspects to Harry Potter is how self-effacing a protagonist he is. Technically here's the hero of the story, but while there are aspects of Aragorn to him, in that he is born to a family of über-magickals, and therefore has a destiny to fulfill; in many ways he's more like Frodo Baggins -- thrust into quests he didn't ask for; a reluctant warrior, a boy who would rather turn the other cheek than fight. All Harry wants is to belong somewhere with people who accept him -- to spend his life in the shire, as it were. His preference would be to simply follow along with the ferocious Hermione, a pint-sized Amazon who's got more smarts and guts than any of the boys at Hogwarts, especially the sneering, tough-talking, cowardly bully Draco Malfoy (once again portrayed to sneering perfection by a now pimply-faced Tom Felton). It may be Harry's story, but Hermione is the action hero.

All three of the Potter films have been showcases for the cream of the British acting crop, and this one is no exception. Returning to the fold are Alan Rickman, who steals every scene he's in, as Professor Snape, Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid (now a professor himself), and Maggie Smith, who has little to do here but scold. Michael Gambon gracefully steps into Richard Harris' shoes as Albus Dumbledore as if he'd always worn them. New to the cast are Gary Oldman, who was born to play the deranged Sirius Black, David Thewlis, a sometimes over-the-top actor who's nicely understated here as Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts Remus Lupin, Timothy Spall and Dawn French, who make only brief but memorable appearances, and Emma Thompson, who channels the spirit of Alistair Sim as the doughty Divination professor Sibyl Trelawney.

HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN bestows so many wonderful gifts on its audience it's hard to know where to begin -- do we start with the shrunken head with the Jamaican accent who navigates the shape-shifting Knight Bus? Or the now delightfully seedy Leaky Cauldron pub? Or the psychology behind disarming Boggarts -- shape-shifters who manifest as whatever we fear most -- who can only be disarmed by imagining what makes us laugh, even if it means Professor Snape in a dress? Cuaron seems well aware of the shadow that the Lord of the Rings films have cast on the last two Potter films, and instead of trying to avoid it, he faces it head-on, by essentially casting Peter Jackson's ring wraiths as the Dementors -- creatures who "feed on every bad experience and every unhappy memory" leaving nothing but misery behind (very much like some people I know). This is the first Potter film freed of the burden of being released right alongside a Rings film, and in a way it's a shame, because this film could easily go head-to-head with Jackson's films in its translation of a fantasy universe into reality. Much of this is thanks to the excellent New Zealand cinematographer Michael Seresin, who for the first time integrates the English countryside and natural scenery into the mythical world of Hogwarts. This gives the school and surrounding environs a context and texture that helps them become their own reality. The effects are more seamlessly integrated into the live action, with the Hippogryff -- a graceful, proud cross between an eagle and a horse -- particularly beautifully done. There's a terrific sequence in which Harry soars through the skies on this creature. Not only does this sequence demonstrate literally the "spreading your wings and fly" metaphor of adolescence as we see Harry's fear slowly drop away to the point that he has his own "king of the world" moment, but there's a lovely, lyrical, joyful moment that transcends its "because we can" technical whiz-bang, in which the hypogriff's claw lightly skims the surface of the water.

The talking paintings of the earlier films, which were merely a gimmick until now, take on a larger role here, becoming characters in their own right in yet another fantasy universe, one in which they are free to wander from painting to painting. It's perhaps the most lunatic use of classic art in pop culture since Chuck Jones compressed Der Ring des Niebelungen into an eight-minute cartoon. In an era in which CGI characters, even those done as beautifully as the Hypogriff, are a dime a dozen, these paintings still astound, for they show real actors dressed as figures in paintings -- and actually looking as if they are appearing on canvas, right down to the texture of the stretched fabric and the brushstrokes of paint.

Under the deft hands of a truly talented director, instead of simply a story stenographer, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN succeeds for the first time in making real both Harry Potter and the world he lives in. Even if you missed the first two films and have never read the books, this is a film that stands out on its own as a cinematic achievement, as a fantasy universe, and as an adaptation of a beloved work. Mike Newell, who helms the next film, will have a tough act to follow.

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