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  EW review: Top-notch 'Oliver Twist'Also: Joyful 'Roll Bounce'By Lisa Schwarzbaum  Ben Kingsley as Fagin and Barney Clark as Oliver in "Oliver Twist." YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- On the face of it, Roman Polanski's "Oliver Twist," with a screenplay by Ronald Harwood, is in the tradition of every faithful "Oliver Twist" ever filmed -- a photogenic, straightforward, CliffsNotes staging of Charles Dickens' harrowing story about a penniless orphan negotiating among cruel and occasionally good adults in a world that has no time for children, and even less for penniless orphans. The London that Polanski reconstructs (in Prague) is a fetid, heartless place that must be navigated by wits, not maps. And as if to prove it, the director propels his action up and down stairs, through dank streets, and even across rooftops, often in the dark or in the rain. The grimy, pint-size pickpockets Oliver falls in with have the crazed, hardened look of children ripped from childhood too soon, and their scaly handler, the sniveling Fagin (Ben Kingsley), is appropriately decayed, all bent of nose (with Semitic intimations) and mossy of teeth. When Fagin clutches Oliver, played by angelic-looking newcomer Barney Clark, in a gnarled gesture of possessiveness (and, in Kingsley's nuanced portrayal, warped love), the contrast between the rotten "Jewishness" of the old man and the Christian luminosity of the boy couldn't be more acute. Yet precisely because this is by Roman Polanski, it's irresistible to read his sorrowful and seemingly classical take, from a filmmaker known as much for the schisms in his personal history as for the lurches in his work, as something much more personal and poignant. As in his previous movie, "The Pianist" (also written by Harwood), Polanski here considers the case of a person shaped (or is it misshaped?) by a fate over which he has no control. Like the musician played by Adrien Brody, Oliver survives by chance. Some people, Polanski darkly observes, are good, others are bad. But most, like Fagin, are mutants, strangled combinations of both. EW Grade: B+ 'Roll Bounce'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman As a fad, roller disco always bordered on the ludicrous. How do you glide forward on skates and get down with your bad self at the same time? Very awkwardly. Yet when you behold the teen boogie skaters of "Roll Bounce," which is set in Chicago in 1978, those funky/silly movements give you a happy jolt of pleasure. It's hard not to notice that the kitschiness of the dancing is what makes it so ... optimistic. The director, Malcolm D. Lee ("The Best Man"), immerses us in the eager daze that ruled the final moment before the dawn of hip-hop. He knows how to use the great riffs of Chic and KC & the Sunshine Band to create a kind of Saturday afternoon fever, and he has a gift for coaxing nuance from the most modest of actors. Bow Wow plays the skate-dance hero in a way that's never too cool to hide what an avid achiever the kid is, and he and his buddies converse in a fiendishly alert middle-class trash talk that keeps "Roll Bounce" jumping. EW Grade: B+ 'Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D'Reviewed by Scott Brown Tom Hanks is back on the moon. Hollywood's official Curator of Former Glories made perfectly noble green-cheese runs in "Apollo 13" and the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," so it's not shocking to see him co-producing and narrating what could pass as a very pretty ad for Lockheed Martin, shot in the dizzy vastness of IMAX 3-D. "Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D" aims for the junior stargazer in a release coinciding with NASA's new moon-by-2018 initiative. The movie is unmistakably a pitch, and an honorable one. But to begin by dismissing cranks who say the walks were sleekly faked, then present a sleekly faked moonwalk (punctuated sporadically with actual lunar photography) seems to reinforce the culture of unreality that reduces major endeavors to CG reenactments and distances us from the very greatness we seek to recapture. Perhaps if "Desolation" hadn't skimped on the science in its race to grab kids' eyeballs, it might've grabbed a couple of future astronauts by the brain. EW Grade: B- Click Here 
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