Oliver Twist: Critic Reviews

It's irresistible to read his sorrowful and seemingly classical take, from a filmmaker known as much for the schisms in his personal history as for the lurches in his work, as something much more personal and poignant.

With tact and enthusiasm, Roman Polanski grabs hold of a great book and rediscovers its true and enduring vitality.

It's noble, high-minded and safe, and I can't help thinking that I would have preferred an audacious but honest failure.

It's as though Polanski had set the story's foolproof motor on cruise control and left the room; the tale is well told but told without personality.

The quality of mercy is strained, but by some strange feat it doesn't dissolve entirely.

Polanski delivers an acceptable yet thoroughly uninspiring twist on the orphaned Oliver, who gets a raw deal every which way.

Nitpickers may squawk over missing elements, but the film doggedly hits on the book's big themes: the power of innocence, the cruelty of class.

The film is worth seeing, but it won't hold a cherished place in your moviegoing memories.

Polanski could have made Oliver as haunting as his 2002 Academy Award-winning film, The Pianist. Yet his new effort falls just short.

Dickens knew that melodrama answers to something permanent in our nature; without it, any version of Oliver Twist draws perilously close to the genteel.

Polanski's film is visually exact and detailed without being too picturesque.

Polanski's Oliver Twist is craftsmanly and relatively unsentimental.

Poignant and primal, Roman Polanski's splendid adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic pricks the heart and the conscience.

The film is high on production values but short on heart.

Oliver Twist as presented by Roman Polanski is pretty much the same as Oliver Twist presented by anyone else, except perhaps it's a bit duller.

Perhaps it will take a school trip to encourage kids to see Oliver Twist, but that's one permission slip parents should sign.

Conventional, straightforward and very much within what used to be called the Traditional of Quality, this handsome film is a respectable literary adaptation but lacks dramatic urgency and intriguing undercurrents.

Polanski's take will spark debate among Dickens lovers, but audiences won't respond as warmly as they have to Lean's classic.

In Oliver Twist, it's the viewer who is punished.

Polanski and his Pianist scribe Ronald Harwood have chosen to tell it in as simple a manner as possible, as though they had been given a Masterpiece Theatre assignment to dispatch.

A work of craft that could be flying the Masterpiece Theatre banner. You know, an earnestly worthy adaptation of a literary classic, as faithful and polished as it is ponderous and unprovocative.

This is that rare movie version of a great novel in which watching is reading.

Technically sound and surprisingly faithful to its source material, Roman Polanski's version of Oliver Twist comes across as uninspired and flat.

The spark that an original point of view might bring to the oft-told tale is missing.