In Theaters: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

As evidenced by its record-testing midnight engagements, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is probably just as (if not more) review-proof as any movie this summer. It's usually an observation reserved for the inauspicious likes of Transformers and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with their pots of gold at the ends of two crap-colored rainbows. Yet it's equally important to note for something as fantastic as Potter, which, for all its elegance, drama, beauty, humor and gravity, is still widely perceived as little beyond a movie for kids and the geeks they grow into. That may or may not be enough for Warner Bros., but after a long, tough summer at the movies, adults deserve something with this much class.

Sure, they may want to wait a few weeks for the initial wave of cloaks, acne medication and shrieks to thin out at the multiplex. But seriously: Don't hold Potter's loyalists against it. Don't even hold the six previous installments against it -- good, bad or unseen. Half-Blood Prince will drop you off close enough to where you need to be: Present-day London, below a formidable skull-shaped cloud and inside the contrails of Death Eaters rocketing through the streets. They move with much greater freedom and impunity than Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) himself, frozen at a cafe table, thisclose to going out with the cute barista before his Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) shows up to whisk him back to his wizardly obligations elsewhere at school and beyond.

That's about the extent of rushing that director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves are prepared to do with J.K. Rowling's dense source material, instead drawing out reintroductions to Potter's chums Hermione Granger (Emma Watson). Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and his sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright). If Yates and Kloves lose themselves at all, it's in the languor of this first act; their young talent isn't quite equipped with the charisma or motivations to stir much interest in their catching up, and anyway, the fans know it all and the uninitiated can't really be brought to care.

After all, there's enough going on at the other end of the Half-Blood continuum, where professor Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) is swearing a vow to protect a young Hogwarts charge on behalf of the dark lord Voldemort. A black-toothed Helena Bonham-Carter coaxes him on, their taut exchanges promising a harder edge to the evil Harry and Co. have faced in the past. And hard is the least of it, as Harry's initial confrontation with tormented nemesis Draco Malfoy (a brilliant Tom Felton) nearly leaves him dead.

There will be more like that -- none more formidable, however, than the principals' vicious new archrival Hormones, the gnawing goblin in each of them who turns Hogwarts into a powder keg of jealousy and sexual anguish. I addressed it some last week with the actors' help, but their accomplishments bear repeating: Facing routine high-school melodramatics, Radcliffe, Watson and Grint carry personas almost too adult for the material at hand. Hermione's unrequited crush on Ron -- all while watching his groping liplocks with ultrahorny Lavender Brown -- are heartbreaking. And Ginny's kissing banditry with Harry and at least one other character implies an impulse of self-discovery that maybe the Vatican might want to think twice about before approving.

The emotions spill over to both the Quidditch pitch (where men are made and scores are settled in two of the film's rare, pure action sequences) and Dumbledore's lair, where the unretirement of an old potions instructor (Jim Broadbent) prompt flashbacks to Voldemort's nascent evil in the halls of Hogwarts. As Voldemort (née Tom Riddle) at 11 and 16, excellent young actors Hero Fiennes-Tiffin and Frank Dillane glower and grin in the long shadows of black-magic epistemology; Broadbent sustains a dynamic chord with his own bumbling, haunted knowledge of the Boy Who Would be the Dark Lord. Yates is generous with this ensemble, and they repay him with interest; the same goes for cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, a Potter virgin who makes gorgeous, Oscar-worthy panoramas of everything from impromptu tarantula memorials to handheld-shot, nighttime battles in tall, swampy grass.

So, yeah. Forgive me for looking past a seven-part fantasy franchise's implied limitations -- thematic inertia, narrative strictures, conceptual bloat, etc. -- and finding honest-to-God art, but there it is, hiding in plain sight. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is almost too good, bearing the mixed blessing of one audience that would have accepted far less and the curse of another audience that won't accept it being more. It'll still make a fortune, but if there's any justice beyond the billions, it will have made an impression.