Les Grandes Espérances

I'm not fond of Charles Dickens' stories, but you just can't deny that the film Great Expectations is good. It's well-shot, well-acted, and in the end, it has scenes that move you, even if you're not a fan of Dickens. Here it's shown that stories about orphans and the poor who eventually make something of themselves actually make sense and are good. (03/10/2014)

It is quite nice. However, with a few minor exceptions, I generally don't have much contact with English cinema. Often their older and contemporary stuff is so disembodied that I prefer to go back to Dickens. Which, on the other hand, wouldn't be so strange if, for example, this famous version wasn't fifth in the BFI top chart. So let them dream their dream of cinema that has resisted Hollywood in every way. So far, I've embraced more so the version with York from the 1970s, and the one transplanted to the present in the late 1990s. The new BBC series looks good but it’s less believable in terms of acting, whereas the 2012 feature-length version is more interesting. I reacted awkwardly to the 1930s adaptation, but I'm looking forward to the BBC classic from the 1990s. And as I search my memory, there must have been another version from the 1980s on Hallmark. I could probably even figure out why this version doesn't work for me, but the contemporary Jane Eyre (1944) does work for me. But is that really necessary? Dickens’s famous novel from 1860-1861 is so attractive and offers so many major themes to be explored that filmmakers will probably never get enough of it. (27/01/2013)