Critic Reviews

• Charlie Lyne, Ultra Culture

  It's the most astonishly inept (and inadvertently hilarious) piece of filmmaking I've seen in a long time.

• Edward Porter, Sunday Times (UK)

  He's a ghost of documentaries past: an actorly tour guide reciting lines not written by him, putting on glasses with a scholarly flourish, staring into space to underline poignant moments in the narrative.

• Philip French, Observer [UK]

  A bland, old-fashioned documentary with a bland, old-fashioned view of Dickens.

• Allan Hunter, Daily Express

  The presentation is pedestrian, the tone is overly reverent and the viewer might find their time better spent reading a Dickens classic.

• Patrick Peters, Empire Magazine

  Whilst the tone and intention are admirable, the excess of facts and locations spread the message and cohesiveness a little thin.

• James Mottram, Film4

  The sort of film even an A-level student of Charles Dickens would find redundant, Julian Richards' slapdash effort is staggeringly inept at times. Best suited to television, it feels so archaic it certainly merits the moniker 'Dickensian'.

• Derek Malcolm, This is London

  Painful in the extreme, showing how even the best actor can be made uncomfortable by clumsy direction.

• Toby Young, Times [UK]

  A comically inept documentary.

• Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]

  A bizarrely stilted, placid, agonisingly slow and hypnotisingly wooden documentary presented by Sir Derek Jacobi. It is like something that might appear on schools TV if everyone behind the camera had been smoking a Constable-Hay-Wain quantity of ganja.

• Tim Evans, Sky Movies

  Jacobi is an enthusiastic guide while you could easily imagine some of the contributors - an endearingly eccentric bunch - appearing on the pages of David Copperfield or Bleak House.

• Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

  This combination of documentary of literary travelogue has no pretensions at all, merely a mad, endearing, Dickensian innocence.

• Anthony Quinn, Independent

  Cut it by an hour and it could be a good and useful introduction to Dickens for English GCSE students, but in its present form this has no place on a cinema screen anywhere.

• Matthew Turner, ViewLondon

  So badly written and so ineptly directed that it's often difficult to sit through without giggling.

Read all 13 critic reviews