InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Geoffrey Reemer I love Charles Dickens and I really wanted to like this movie. After all, there are plenty of things to like. Ben Kingsley is awesome as Fagin, Bill Sykes is threatening without overplaying it, Harry Eden is a great Artful Dodger and the story has its touching moments.But in order for Oliver Twist to be great, you need a great Oliver Twist. I'm sure Barney Clark is a very nice young man. He's definitely trying to make the best out of it, and he definitely has potential as an actor. But his portrayal of Oliver doesn't cut it for me. He is just way too depressing. He spends about the first hour of the movie crying, begging and/or fainting. We don't get to know his motivations, his desires or his goals. He's just there to take a boatload of misery, but I just don't care what happens to him. Character development comes from within, and this just wasn't the case for Oliver.I like the 1968 musical a lot better, because Mark Lester plays a much more endearing and pro- active Oliver. To me, this version seemed more like "Diary of a wimpy kid" (literally). I know this 2005-version is a lot of people's favorite, but I found it too melodramatic and over-the-top depressing. Too bad, because the potential was there.

Prismark10 The story of Oliver Twist is well known. The book has been read by generations of children and adults and there have been TV and film adaptations aplenty.The most well remembered version is the musical Oliver with Mark Lester, Oliver Reed and Ron Moody.Roman Polanski has dared to do a slightly different adaptation, he keeps faith with Dicken's expression of the brutality of Victorian life for the have nots and the wretched.When Oliver meets Fagin we get a homage to the musical Oliver as Fagin teaches him how to pick a pocket or two.What is strange is the narrative moves rather rapidly from Fagin's gang to him being taken care of by the kindly Mr Brownlow to being snatched by Sykes.Jamie Foreman seems to have been miscast as Sykes, a big man but seems to lack menace even though his father was a real life London villain, I felt Mark Strong would had been an interesting Sykes but he plays another character in this film.Kingsley has the difficult job of re-interpreting Fagin by I think he does a functional job, Ron Moody is still tops.Barney Clark has the face for Oliver and holds the film together well as the unfortunate orphan.

Ali Catterall Charles Dickens' imagination, wrote George Orwell, "overwhelms everything like a kind of weed", and it's true that his works translate to the screen extremely well for that reason. Whether or not you also agree with Orwell that Dickens' characters "start off as magic lantern slides and they end up by getting mixed up in a third-rate movie" is a matter for personal taste - though only the grouchiest critic would brand Polanski's take on this family favourite anything like a massive let-down. What Dickens is best at, of course, is story - and here, Polanski delivers; there's also a sense he's aiming for the definitive version - more knockabout than David Lean's, darker than Carol Reed's. However, like those cinematic predecessors it's necessarily rendered in shorthand and distilled to the prime components: orphans, beadles, pickpockets, prostitutes and kindly benefactors. It looks great, or at least 'Dickensian', as screenwriter Ronald Harwood says: "not the historical sociological truth - that's boring", and Polanski's London is a hyperreal dystopian theme park where everyone seems to be spilling out of taverns in mid-fistfight. Kingsley's practically unrecognisable as Fagin, while Oliver (Clark) isn't half as soppy as forebear Mark Lester, even sporting a bit of an Estuary twang. Bur Foreman as Bill Sikes is no Oliver Reed - whose own portrayal still has the capacity to turn children's matinees into panicked paddling pools. Also, the mind hiccups at crucial plot points: it's Lionel Bart's glorious songs we most associate with Oliver, and tellingly, this version feels strangely hollower for their exclusion.

keith-moyes Dickens is one of the great storytellers in literature, but the natural dramatic medium for his rambling shaggy dog stories is the TV mini-series, not the movies.Oliver Twist is one of his shorter books, but even so, Ronald Harwood was only able to compress it into two hours by cutting great swathes of the novel. It is reasonably faithful up to the half-way stage, but then loses all the sub-plots concerning the mystery of Oliver's birth, his bitter enemy Monks, his connection with Mr Brownlow, Mrs Maylie, the love affair between Rose Maylie and Dr Losberne, the return of Mr Bumble, the treachery of Noah Claypole and so on.However, Harwood's compression actually works well on its own terms and if you are not familiar with the book there is no reason why any of these omissions should trouble you. In certain respects, it even improves on its source material, because in the book Oliver becomes less and less involved as the story proceeds: he becomes the object rather than the subject of the narrative. Harwood's screenplay keeps Oliver much more in focus and more central to the action and has the merit of putting him in jeopardy at the movie's climax.My problems with this movie have nothing to do with its fidelity to the text. It is simply that it is not very memorable in its own right. The performances are all relatively low-key and fail to capture the vividness of Dickens's characters; the production design is not particularly impressive; the pacing is too measured; and the movie continually veers away from Dickens's full-blooded emotionalism. It is never angry enough, bitter enough, sad enough, happy enough, funny enough or frightening enough.Perhaps I was expecting too much. While I always felt that the world didn't really need another Oliver Twist, I was nonetheless very intrigued to see what Dickens would look like when filtered through Polanski's dark, perverse imagination. I never found out, because it is actually a competent, unfussy, very straightforward movie that could have been made by almost anyone.In short: not enough Dickens and not enough Polanski."Please, Sir, I want some more."