Nicholas Nickleby: Critic Reviews

Trust and deceit, generosity and meanness are fleshed out by a deft cast.

The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs, a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.

This mid-19th century tale of survival after the death of a parent is still compelling today, and its message of strength and the importance of family continues to resonate.

The cinematic equivalent of a glass of warm milk to soothe overstimulated nerves.

It's a Filene's Basement epic for the Masterpiece Theatre crowd.

The movie's a rambunctious joy.

Unwieldy contraption.

With Dickens' words and writer-director Douglas McGrath's even-toned direction, a ripping good yarn is told.

The entire movie has a truncated feeling, but what's available is lovely and lovable.

The movie is jolly and exciting and brimming with life, and wonderfully well-acted.

McGrath's version of Nicholas Nickleby cashes in on age-old show biz wisdom of 'always leave 'em wanting more.'

It's just sort of there, one more adaptation of a long rambling Charles Dickens soap opera well-stocked with respected British actors playing painfully stereotypical characters.

The film is enriched by an imaginatively mixed cast of antic spirits, headed by Christopher Plummer as the subtlest and most complexly evil Uncle Ralph I've ever seen in the many film and stage adaptations of the work.

A delightful experience.

Nathan Lane as the flamboyant theatrical impresario Crummles has never been better or more restrained on film, and Alan Cumming and Timothy Spall are a pleasure, as always.

McGrath has rendered the weighty, moving and engrossing Dickens tale into a near sitcom.

There's a bevy of hiss-worthy baddies to pick up the dramatic slack, beginning with Plummer's wonderfully nefarious Uncle Ralph.

If not every scene bears the Masterpiece Theatre seal of authenticity, the parade of vividly drawn characters is always good fun.

To paraphrase a line from another Dickens' novel, Nicholas Nickleby is too much like a fragment of an underdone potato.

As a means to bring a classic novel to the attention of a modern audience, McGrath's Nicholas Nickleby is a success.

Perhaps too much got boiled away. As it is, the plot contrivances are too obvious, if not preposterous, and the portrayal of evil seems remote for modern audiences.

A beguiling evocation of the quality that keeps Dickens evergreen: the exuberant openness with which he expresses our most basic emotions.