Penumbrously lit by Portuguese-born French cinematographer Eduardo Serra, the latest and penultimate film in the Harry Potter cycle (in fact the first half of JK Rowling's final book) begins with an ominous, Sergio Leone-style close-up of Bill Nighy telling us: "These are dark times." He sounds like any member of the coalition cabinet at the dispatch box, but he is, in fact, Rufus Scrimgeour, minister of magic. But more recently in popular culture, and especially in the movies, it's come to mean deep, serious, mature, dangerous and altogether more truthful, more worthy of intelligent consideration than anything categorised as "light" and thus frivolous and deceptive. The adjective "dark" has always suggested something sinister, often associated with the Prince of Darkness.
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