Disney's A Christmas Carol
(Robert Zemeckis): Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, Fionnuala Flanagan.
Running time: 96 mins
Rating: 4/5(PG)

Let's not be Scrooge-like towards this unexpectedly faithful and scary retelling of a Charles Dickens novella that has become as much part of the annual cheery Christmas celebration as mistletoe and plum pudding.

Director Robert Zemeckis combines Disney's Digital 3D with his unique motion-capture technique pioneered in The Polar Express and Beowulf to give awesome visual form to a timeless parable of redemption.

Up to now, attempts to dramatise A Christmas Carol foundered on an inability to give believability to the ghosts that put the miserly Scrooge through the emotional wringer of nightmare confrontations with his heartless penny-pinching past, present and life to come. By rendering live action into digital form, Zemeckis achieves a dramatic world in which real and fantasy figures co-exist in the same time and space.

Everything is terrifyingly possible, with Jim Carrey portraying not only Scrooge at every age but also the ghosts of his dead partner Marley that haunt him, while Gary Oldman is both the meek, cruelly exploited clerk Bob Cratchit and his consumptive son Tiny Tim.

Visually it's a sumptuous throwback to the shadow language of German expressionist cinema of the 1920s. Zemeckis exaggerates facial expressions, distorts body movements and plays tricks with voices to prey on our fears, but always within a deeply human indignation at inequality and longing for love and fairness.