Worth seeing if for nothing more than the opening credits, unspooled in front of a Victorian toy theater of the type that Stevenson memorialized in his essay, "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured." Each of the principal players is represented by a look-alike paper cutout, and the behind-the-scenes collaborators are represented symbolically: the editor by a pair of scissors, the cameraman by a lighted lamp, the executive producers by sacks of money, and so on. Utterly charming, enchanting, transporting. But the movie has more to recommend it. If the preciousness of the opening, together with the warbling narration of Nathan Lane, lacks something of the red-blooded conviction and urgency of Dickens's prose, it must be marked down as yet another casualty of our modern self-consciousness. Still, writer-director Douglas McGrath has done a sturdier job of adaptation here than he did in Emma, or perhaps it's just that Dickens can put up a sturdier resistance than Jane Austen, that he can withstand heavier losses. When you consider the fatness of the novel, or consider the eight-hour duration of the celebrated stage production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, it is quite remarkable how well the movie conveys a Dickensian sense of expansive and luxurious storytelling at a mere two hours and a quarter. The necessities all seem to be there: the twists of fate, the conniving villainy, the casual cruelty, the long and winding road, the tender shoots of tender sentiment, the tearjerking, the laugh-jerking, the cries for justice, the satisfying comeuppance, and the happiest ending possible in full consciousness of the hardships of life and the human capacity for making it harder. The rousing score by Rachel Portman, a horsewhip to our emotions, manages deftly to sidestep the pitfall of self-consciousness. With Charlie Hunnam, Jamie Bell, Christopher Plummer, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson, Edward Fox, Timothy Spall, Anne Hathaway. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd