Sorry folks, but I believe Goblet of Fire was the WORST of the four, by far. I'm not sure how much this was due to the fact that I've read the book, but I seriously tried to put that out of my head. Unfortunately, that didn't help... this film may be a decent travelogue through "highlights of the book" but doesn't stand on its own as a movie.
I felt like the film was very poorly edited, with very abrupt scene transitions, where more pensive transitions would have been more appropriate. In a few scenes, it almost seemed to me that they cut individual sentences out of specific paragraphs of dialog that the actor actually did deliver on film, just to save a few seconds, or more likely, just because those sentences required inclusion of other scenes in the film in order to make sense, scenes that had been edited out or not included in the first place. My wife picked up on this and said that the film didn't "flow" very well -- that is "jumped" around. This isn't necessarily because they cut too many scenes, but rather because the scenes they left in were either not the correct set, or were not adequately woven together into a cohesive story.
I found myself caring absolutely not-at-all for Ianevski's character, de la Tour's character, and Poésy's character, which was surely not the case while reading the book. I don't think this was necessarily because those actors didn't breathe life into their characters, but rather because the editing focused on our main characters so much that these other characters were cut so badly that they seemed to me to be little more than cardboard cut-outs. This was especially bad since by making us not care so much about those characters, a major theme in the book was lost.
Besides making the film longer, a more judicious bit of editing might have helped. I won't go into specifics, because they'd be spoilers. What I'll say, though, is that there were some scenes with Ron that could have easily been cut without affecting the story so much, and that would have made room for some scenes that would have made the characters I mentioned before more lifelike. Ron only needed to be a focus character in two scenes in this film, and as a matter of fact, Hermoine was only a focus character in these two scenes, so it wasn't just a matter that a major character "needed" more scenes for some reason.
Could Book 4 have been stretched into two films? No. But I think they should have considered a longer film, and could have benefited from a better selection of scenes to include versus scenes to exclude.
