Carol Reed has just made the kind of movie they don’t make anymore, and it’s as good as ever -- maybe better, coming when it’s more difficult to do.

| Jul 6, 2022

The most important thing about [Oliver!] is pleasure, the sheer delight of a movie that can change the lives of kids who see it -- for the better, for the better -- and serve as a public bath for adults to luxuriate in, sing in, get cleansed in.

| Jul 6, 2022

In the constant seesaw of realism/fantasy it is hard for anyone to keep one clear thread continuously in mind, and most of the performances are as muddled and indecisive as you might expect.

| Mar 3, 2022

Oliver! is a musical that couldn't give you a spoonful more if you got down on your knees and begged for it. It gives all it has got and a tremendous amount of enjoyment that turns out to be.

| Mar 3, 2022

Carol Reed directing a musical? Fair enough, when the musical is Lionel Bart's version of Oliver Twist and when you remember Sir Carol's way with child actors.

| Mar 3, 2022

The show survives on Bart's music; and Onna White has devised the wonderful dance routines with some brilliantly ingenious effects.

| Mar 3, 2022

Oliver! is very much Dickens' story, but with Lionel Bart's rollicking music spread lavishly throughout, it becomes almost an opera at times.

| Mar 3, 2022

There is not a bad performance in the movie -- although Hugh Griffith seems teetering on the brink of one as a drunken magistrate -- but the movie is dominated by Ron Moody's brilliant tour de force as Fagin.

| Mar 3, 2022

A prancing musical film which, by reason of its stagecraft and performance, is more exhilarating than it was on the stage.

| Mar 3, 2022

The picture is lavishly mounted and photographed in subdued colors and it is easy to see why it got the best picture of the year and five other academy awards.

| Mar 3, 2022

Ron Moody's Fagin is superlative, a figure of irresistible charm, a masterpiece of comic villainy. He is a marvelous clown who can sing and dance so well that his sensitive acting is like a bonus.

| Mar 2, 2022

On stage, Oliver! was an appealing but less than surpassing entertainment... The transition to film has been not a transfer but a transformation, and it serves as an object lesson in the uses of the film medium.

| Mar 2, 2022

Both Ron Moody as the scheming larceny tutor and young Jack Wild as his most artful pupil were nominated for Oscars in their roles. And, though they didn't win, they are highly deserved nominations.

| Mar 2, 2022

Carol Reed's Oliver! is an incredibly rich screen musical, worth seeing once for the overall dazzle, worth seeing again for all the small bits of artistry -- all the touches of genius at work in this superlative movie.

| Mar 2, 2022

Most film adaptations of stage musicals in the last decade have, for the most part, been mediocre at best... Only two have stood apart from the rest: West Side Story and My Fair Lady. Now add a third.

| Mar 2, 2022

It is a production worth seeing for its dramatic content, the singing of Shani Wallis as Nancy, and the overall picture it gives of an age when orphans were sold in the streets as virtual slaves.

| Mar 2, 2022

A pleasant adventure for the family, an entirely innocent escapade into a cute world of old London which seemingly is dominated by little lads, dancing orange vendors and the most inviting dens for thieves.

| Mar 2, 2022

[A] picture that will as firmly imprint itself on the imagination of the young as did some scenes in Snow White more than a generation ago.

| Sep 25, 2018

l'm going to stick my neck out and say it's the best musical I have ever seen.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 27, 2015

Even if you're not a fan of the musicals, Oliver is so witty, so bright and so endearing that even the iciest viewer should start melting in its corona.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 24, 2014