It is skillfully made and adeptly performed; even so it doesn't really add anything to the canon.

| Nov 10, 2013

This Great Expectations is an absorbing addition to the roster of Dickens films that continues our 21st-century fascination with the worlds created by a 19th-century storyteller.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 8, 2013

Director Mike Newell approaches the sprawling bildungsroman with a stiff formalism, sacrificing all cinematic excitement for the sake of exalting great performances.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 8, 2013

Honors the source while making some small but significant alterations.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 8, 2013

As the pages turn faster, focusing on the hows and whys of a major crime central to the plot, this concision and velocity make the film feel like a modern thriller. Booo.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 8, 2013

An honorable, sober but completely unnecessary take on the Dickens novel, "Great Expectations" serves as a fine introduction to the story but won't excite those familiar with previous versions.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 7, 2013

It's a welcome and faithful addition to the canon, despite some tweaks.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 7, 2013

It's good, not great - but, for some of us, expectations will be met, and then some.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 7, 2013

For all its lapses, the portrait of a Darwinian social order of haves and have-nots resonates with the chilly, jittery times in which we live.

| Nov 7, 2013

For those who prefer their classic literary adaptations to be as pure as possible, Great Expectations will be a happy addition to the canon.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 7, 2013

Yet another big-screen version of Dickens' exquisite tale of striving, charity and arrogance highlights the Gothic deliciousness of the tale.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 7, 2013

Does this iteration have anything new, fresh, or innovative to recommend it? Nope.

| Original Score: C+ | Nov 7, 2013

This remake is the victim of its own loyalty, forgetting that the confounding of expectation is what brought the story to life in the first place.

| Original Score: 6.2/10 | Nov 7, 2013

If your own expectations are not too high, you crave period-costume drama and you're one of those unfortunate people who refuses to watch anything in glorious black-and-white, this Great Expectations is worth the time and effort.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 6, 2013

One can't help but feel Dickens's classic text has been bent and broken-and not necessarily into a better shape.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 5, 2013

Lazy English teachers who park their students in front of this will be doing those kids a service.

| Nov 5, 2013

Others may feel they've seen it all before (at the press screening, the air was thick with yawns). But not me.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 30, 2012

It's all very Tim Burton - but eccentric Victoriana is a fitting spin on a familiar tale.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 29, 2012

An attractive and robust screen adaptation of the classic 1861 Dickens parable of false hopes, thwarted vanities and the mysterious workings of sowing and reaping.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 29, 2012

Mike Four Weddings and a Funeral Newell directs the only way he could, as if he hasn't noticed the direness of the project.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 29, 2012