Oliver Twist

A far cry from the 1968 musical OLIVER!, Roman Polanski's heavily atmospheric abridgment of Charles Dickens' masterpiece is dark, dank and violent, filled with terrifying scenes in which exploited children are beaten, shot or starving to death. In other words, it's just as Dickens wrote. Ronald Harwood's deft screenplay picks up with 19th-century orphan Oliver Twist (Barney Clark) returning to the Northampton parish workhouse where he was born nine years earlier. After making the mistake of asking for more of the workhouse's foul gruel, Oliver is shipped out to live with a kindly but meek coffin maker (Michael Heath) and his petty, overbearing wife (Gillian Hanna), w...