The biggest surprise in Roman Polanski's "Oliver Twist" is that there are no surprises. In retelling Charles Dickens' most beloved tale -- with the possible exception of "A Christmas Carol" -- the director relates the familiar story in an all-too-familiar way. Given Polanski's own harrowing childhood in the Polish countryside, surviving the Nazi occupation, one might have hoped that he would use young Oliver's adventures as a penniless orphan adrift in a corrupt and abusive 19th century England as a kind of spiritual autobiography of those years.

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