Mike Newell’s Great Expectations will leave you with great questions

You cannot have failed to learn that a new film adaptation of Great Expectations has been released today. Publicity for the film is ubiquitous: posters of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham adorn the billboards of train stations and the hoardings that overlook thoroughfares. The stars have been interviewed on television and the radio. Even the press has found time to divert its manic attention from Sir Brian Leveson’s clever, clever musings to review the film. The coverage asks the question, do we need another adaptation of Dickens’ well-studied classic? There are plenty of views but few of them bother to consider the novelty of this adaptation (perhaps because the book has not been as closely studied as we assume). David Nicolls’ script has reworked Dickens’ ending(s) so that the film walks between a sentimental outcome and a truthful one.