We Are Wizards: Critic Reviews

[Director] Koury doesn't make any points in We Are Wizards, particularly, but he stylishly shares the love.

The filmmaker Josh Koury has latched onto a great subject for We Are Wizards, his peek at some of the more engaged fans circulating in the Harry Potter world.

The documentary sweetly focuses our attention on the way human creativity transforms everything around it. Often in the nuttiest of ways, true. But still, it's a good thing.

Ignore the scattershot approach, however, and there's considerable pleasure to be had in spending time with these bizarre enthusiasts and watching the creative ways they find to express their obsessions.

A fun project that doesn't quite reach its potential, Josh Koury's doc is still worthwhile for anyone who can't wait until 2009 to see Harry Potter back on the big screen.

Among movies about fans' obsessive fixations on fictional universes, the film registers neither as bemusedly distanced as Trekkies nor as dramatically engaged as King of Kong.

Mostly We Are Wizards is a loving, if flawed, tribute to creativity and artistic freedom.

Only for the most drooling of fanboys.

Breakthrough film maker Josh Koury's latest documentary manages to go to the head of the parade of Potter fans, but the average viewer may not be sure why he went to the trouble.

Josh Koury's documentary about hardcore Harry Potter fans, meandering and amiable, reveals that resistance to consumer culture is pretty much futile.

As with most uncontrollable pop-cultural phenomena, the various groups and organizations that have popped up around the Harry Potter franchise are more fascinating than the bespectacled object of their slavish devotion.

Josh Koury's lighthearted documentary may only appeal to the faithful, but, apparently, the faithful comprises an enormous number of people.

Harry Potter addicts may get a kick out of this documentary.

astoundingly irritating

Koury does a masterful job emphasizing literacy and purity of spirit in Wizards, assembling an often delightful documentary that celebrates the tight cultural grip of Potter and its fringe pastimes.

A better approach would have been one that focused less on a child's home movies and performances and more on why he's on stage singing about an imaginary wizard.

There's ultimately very little to take the movie beyond the realm of pleasantly diverting DVD bonus feature.

How the dynamic between inspiration and creation operates is a topic that We Are Wizards tantalizingly puts forward but fails to fully examine.

Koury goes back and forth among the threads, but he could have used a few more threads and his camera was not always on the most interesting material.

I still don't get the big deal with Harry Potter, but the passion and love transferred through a positive outlet will appeal to anyone...

The greatest weakness with "We Are Wizards" is that there's just not much of an arc to the film at all. Josh Koury, the director, presents the information about the bands and the fan sites largely as just chunks of information, with not much in the way of