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Tuesday, January 24, 2006

This Week's Hot Video: 'Oliver Twist'

Roman Polanski, who says his purpose was to make a film for his children, turns Charles Dickens' novel into a fast-moving, picturesque and colorfully cast movie, with its $60 million budget up on the screen.

After innocent Oliver Twist (Barney Clark) is pushed out of an orphanage for asking for "more," he runs away from an apprenticeship to an undertaker and takes a long walk to London, where he falls in with the thief Fagin (Ben Kingsley) and his band of young pickpockets. A chance at a better life is thwarted by thuggish Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman) and the film comes to a violent climax after a murder, on the rooftops of London.

Screenwriter Ronald Harwood dropped some of Dickens' harder-to-believe coincidences, but this take doesn't quite hit the emotional heights of earlier films by David Lean and Carol Reed.

Polanski talks about making the film on one of three DVD featurettes. 128 minutes. Rated PG-13 for disturbing images. (P-I staff)

GRADE: B

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