Oliver Twist (2005)
Directed by Roman Polanski
An orphan endures a harsh life in a workhouse before fleeing to London, where he falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the criminal Fagin, and eventually finds a better life, exposing the cruelties of poverty and child labor in Victorian England.
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What critics compared Oliver Twist to
Inspired by Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” and set amid the 1970s London fashion scene, director Craig Gillespie and screenwriters Dana Fox and Tony McNamara have given the iconic villain a sensational makeover as well as heart and a reason for why she turned so wicked.
The three of them are like the child thieves of — again — Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.”
He might have added The Truman Show (for the TV cameras hidden throughout the forest environment to catch every pursuit and fatality), Oliver Twist (for the children forced by adults into criminal behavior), Romeo and Juliet (for the poison that two lovers plan to take) and, centrally, Richard Connell’s 1924 story “The Most Dangerous Game,” whose scenario of a mad Cossack trapping humans on his Caribbean island and hunting them down like big game has inspired a couple dozen Hollywood films.
Sparks fly between the two, which presents a problem as he’s a kept boy-toy for Riley Keough’s Krystal, the Fagin of this Oliver Twist riff.
Drinking and drugging when they’re not spinning sob stories to strangers, they’re a combination of Fagin’s pickpocketing orphans in Dickens’ Oliver Twist and the hedonistic teens of Larry Clark’s Kids.
Oddly, American Honey might have some of its roots in Arnold’s own country, by way of Charles Dickens and his Oliver Twist.
The prevalent drear and damp of the film's outdoor environs -- Germany standing in for Martha's Vineyard -- comes courtesy of painterly lensing by Pawel Edelman, who shot Polanski's " The Pianist " and " Oliver Twist ."
Polanski has been playing too nice as of late, lingering over his post-Pirates choices with more misses (The Ninth Gate, Oliver Twist) than hits (an Oscar for The Pianist).
He’s been off vacationing inside of his youthful trauma during the last decade (“The Pianist,” “Oliver Twist”), which makes his new film a cunning achievement, steered by one of the filmdom’s sharpest minds.
Cinematographer Pawel Edelman, who worked with Polanski on “The Pianist” and “Oliver Twist,” does a masterful job of capturing the sodden and swampy atmosphere of Lang’s beach retreat and lends a slick and stylish edge to the extended scenes of cat-and-mouse that make up much of the second half of the film.