It took a lot of magic to lift the curse of the bad sequel but the fifth Harry Potter movie managed to do it. Like the four previous movies it was well made. I even had the impression that less of the story got lost when the book had to be compressed to fit into the time-frame of a movie. But maybe that is just because the fifth volume was less dense than the previous ones.
A bunch of new characters were introduced and I was especially pleased by the performance of Imelda Staunton. She portrayed Dolores Umbridge just as nasty and wretched as J.K. Rowling describes her in the book.