It is Harry Potter's fourth year at Hogwarts, and the big event of the semester is the perilous and prestigious TriWizard Tournament. Harry is too young to enter, but somehow his name is selected by the magical Goblet which puts forward the contestants, an act that forces him to partake.

His nomination causes consternation among his fellow pupils (in particular best bud Ron), but the reckless new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Alastor "MadEye" Moody (Brendan Gleeson) offers sound advice for the competition.

Meanwhile Harry is plagued by suspiciously realistic nightmares about evil dark lord Voldemort, and finds himself engaging in his first teenage crush.

As Alfonso Cuaron proved with the last Harry Potter film, the series benefits greatly from a director willing to infuse a little grit and personally into an adaptation. The first two movies, directed by Chris Columbus, were superficially competent, but undeniably flat in tone and lacking in wonder.

Now we have the fourth film, directed for the first time by a Brit (Mike Newell, helmer of Donnie Brasco; Four Weddings and Funeral and Pushing Tin) who thankfully leans closer to Cuaron's sensibility than Columbus'.

He may not quite possess the perceptive grasp of pubescent interaction that Cuaron lent Prisonor of Azkaban, but Newell does an excellent job of building an ominous tone around Hogwarts; shoots the action scenes with flair and creativity and unleashes the scarier scenes with an admirable lack of restraint.

These and other elements help make Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the most enjoyable of the series so far, although it's becoming a bit of a cliché to say that with each new instalment. Pity the director who drops the ball.

But this latest film is the most fun, not just because of the attributes listed above; or the inevitable (albeit slow) maturing of its young characters, but also because it features some supremely cool set-pieces and standard-setting special effects.

By Dominic Corry