This one is surely my favorite rendition of Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations into a movie. The story is brilliantly told and masterfully executed thanks to the stellar performances by Ioan Gruffudd, Charlotte Rampling, Daniel Evans and others. Gruffudd's Pip is more believable and mysterious at the same time. He plays him very convincingly. Gruffudd should do more of period pieces as he does them SO artistically well. Such roles come to him so naturally. And his voice: He brings all the charm, music and pathos only by uttering his thoughts in words. You could linger on every word that he utters. Such is the beauty and spell of his voice!Joe and Biddy are beautifully depicted. They bring joy to an otherwise sad story by their mere presence. Miss Havisham looks ravishing and tragic at the same time. In my opinion, this is by far the finest version of the Great Expectations. I,therefore, highly recommend it to the true lovers of literature. They would not only love the movie but they would adore the book even more after watching this. Its kinda sad to see that such masterpieces don't make their inroads into the mainstream Hollywood cinema. Coz if they do, I am certain that they would gain more popularity and recognition which pieces like this truly deserve in tons. All and all a beautiful beautiful period drama not to be missed at any cost.

One of the cruelest stories I know. Dickens is so cruel we cannot imagine he is a man, what's more a humane human being.A poor orphan, Pip, is raised by a poor blacksmith. A life of rough and tough luck. Take it or leave it, but there is no way out, except the radical one. And he dreams of being a gentleman one day. An aberration of course, morally wrong and bad taste.He is selected and invited by Miss Havisham, a deranged rich woman who is mourning in total decay and sorrow after the failure of her wedding when the bridegroom did not come, twenty years before. Her objective is to provide a male companion and eventually husband to her adopted daughter, Estella.But one night on the moor Pip is "accosted" by an prison escapee of some kind who asks for food and the boy of six or seven, maybe eight provides in the night, including a file for him to get rid of his manacles. He will turn up as his benefactor.Luck, luck and luck. But then systematically Dickens shatters every single opportunity and hope on the side of the boy, Pip, who ends up in prison for unpaid debts, on the side of his benefactor, Abel, who will die in prison holding Pip's hand after his final arrest, on the side of Miss Havisham who will achieve none of her plans, on the side of Estella who will marry the rich and noble young man, will be brutalized and will end up alone in Miss Havisham's house, on the side of Biddy who will marry Joe the Blacksmith when Pip finally realizes she had been his closest ever friend, and even on the side of Estella who will refuse to requite Pip's love, though she will accept to make him her platonic companion in Miss Havisham's.redecorated house.That cruelty is so extreme that we just wonder if Dickens then is not going through a phase of complete social rejection, rejection of the upper classes, rejection of the lower classes, rejection of justice, rejection of any discourse about the possible improvement of individuals and society. Absolute resignation and pessimistic submission to a totally inhumane world that only has some small pockets of satisfaction, but never for yourself, always for some rare others. He did not even salvage the exiled criminal who became Pip's benefactor, as Victor Hugo did in Les Misérables, and makes him die a solitary, nearly solitary death in prison with the sole company of the young man he tried and failed to help, and unaware of his daughter's fate, which does not seem to be particularly brilliant anyway, since she is Estella, daughter of a female assassin and a male exiled criminal condemned to absolute reclusion for life.I just wonder if here Dickens does not reach Zola's pessimism who considered that anyone born in a criminal circle could only be that and drag everyone around him down into that criminal circle. No salvation for those who are badly born. The belief in an elected people turned into a savage and wild social Darwinism: some have been elected to be crushed and powdered by life as slowly as possible for them to regret ever being born but absolutely unable to shorten the ordeal.Sad and sad and sad.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This is quite a good version, but be prepared for some oddities. The main one that Pip is made less nice than usual. His friendship with Joe is made to seem particularly one-sided, and he is extra reluctant to help Magwitch on the latter's return. Both young and older Pip are well played -- Gabriel Thomson deserves particular praise -- but we never feel that we really know the character. This is perhaps the main defect of this version. The voice-over in the old David Lean version was helpful there.I personally don't like Charlotte Rampling as Miss Havisham. The role should not have been glamourised. Dickens does not do glamour. Estella is good however. Compare this performance with the oversweet Estella of the David Lean film.By the way, this version has an excellent Herbert Pocket. The goody-goody characters in Dickens are not easy to play without sugary sentimentality, but Daniel Evans' Herbert really lives.

`Great Expectations' is the best of Charles Dickens's novels. Maybe it's the best novel that there is. It's certainly a novel where every incident is important - so there is no excuse for a TV version being a miserable three hours long. If they HAD to truncate it, though, then there's no help for it: some valuable scenes must be removed. What they've done instead is to sort of leave everything in, but skate over it all at high speed. It's as if they've simply left out every other sentence. The opening encounter with Magwitch in the churchyard is conveyed without being shown at all. We get a few seconds of terror, then a cut to later that evening, and then we're shown a bit more of the crucial scene in flashback - only just enough to understand what is going on, if that. (Don't even get me STARTED on the ludicrous editing, or the self-consciously arty camera angles.) Some scenes have been re-written. The result is usually awful.Is this just the complaint of someone who has read the book, and finds the filmed version to be different? No: rather the reverse. If you haven't read the book you'll have a much harder time than I did even making sense of things; and you won't, as I did, have any particular reason to care about the characters.For instance: the central character is Pip. Anyone who has read the book knows how close Dickens brings us to him. Not once in this version are we, so to speak, introduced to Pip. No scene lasts long enough - he does not confide in any other character long enough - for us to get a sense of his motivations or a reason to continue to sympathise with him after he does something shameful. What's more, the mature Pip is an utter disaster. The re-writing of key encounters with Miss Havisham, Orlick, and Estella (that's right - all three) makes Pip out to be more thoughtless, more cowardly, more vindictive and less intelligent than Dickens makes him out to be. (Note that Dickens doesn't make him out to be vindictive at all.) If we care what happens to him at all it's only because we have even less reason to care what happens to anyone else.I've only scratched the surface - it's bad all the way through. I will, though, allow that many of the actors give excellent performances under trying circumstances. (I can't warm at all to Ioan Gruffudd as the mature Pip, but that was probably the script.) That's about it. I can't even recommend this as the best TV version going, since the Disney series of 1989 (a decent five hours long) is all that one could wish for. With that version in existence this one was just a waste of everyone's time. Don't make it a waste of yours.