FX's A Christmas Carol

Dickens's story is treated here as a criminal file rather than a ghost tale. Scrooge is not merely a miser. He ruins other people's lives deliberately and uses his advantage to humiliate them. The spirits arrive not to forgive him but to sit him down in front of what he has done. Steven Knight wrote it and Nick Murphy directed. Guy Pearce plays Scrooge not as a good man gone astray but as somebody genuinely cold. The three part production aired on FX on 19 December 2019 and on the BBC over Christmas. Critics split, and the reason for the split is clear enough. Some found the darkness pointlessly gratuitous, edginess for its own sake; others called it the most complete adaptation yet made. The additions to Scrooge's past drew the most argument, since they introduce heavy material that is nowhere in the source. Who it is for: viewers who like dark reinventions of classic texts. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a Christmas film to watch with the family.