One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

I've seen almost all the iterations of this classic novel's film adaptations. The acting is solid by the cast. The screenwriting and direction is compelling. The only reason I have marked down the rating is because I feel there is not enough of it. I don't know if it was written that way or if too much was left on the cutting room floor. It's 69 minute run time is apparently not enough to do justice to the tale. It almost feels like it's rushed and cannot wait to get to the ending credits, particularly in the visitations of the spirits and their education of Scrooge. Scrooge seems to flip from "Bah Humbug" to "Merry Christmas" like an on/off light switch when his conversion should be more gradual. Maybe it's just picking at nits, but that aspect of the movie really bothered me. Hence, the 6 rating.

This is a great film. It is very spooky. In an adaptation of the Dickens classic, 3 ghosts haunt a miser on Christmas eve. If you like ghost stories then you need to see this movie. This movie has a great story line. It also has great acting. It also has great special effects. This one of the best fantasy movies ever. This a great film. The book is a great book. It has a great moral. This one of the best ghost stories of all time. The movie is a must see. Great movie great movie great movie. The 1951 version is better, but only a little bit. The 1986 version is better. But only a little bit. See this movie. It is a great movie. It is a true classic.

This a pretty decent, fairly reliable version of Dickens' famous story. Reginald Owen is an above average Scrooge, much more formidable than he is often portrayed. He is lithe and athletic in appearance and quite frightening to those who encounter him. He is lacking depth of character, not being the actor that Alistair Sim is, but still manages to do the job. Sim's Scrooge has a kind of depth, a touch of melancholy, that none of the others, including George C. Scott and Patrick Stewart, had. What I don't care for in this is some plot elements that could have been left alone. Cratchitt getting fired for throwing snowball at Scrooge seemed silly. It eliminated the tender scene at the end where Scrooge waits for the tardy clerk in his office. The scene here where he actually shows up at Bob's house is frantic and silly. Gene Lockhart is a reasonably good Cratchitt, but in most of the renditions he is seen as a bit too well fed and his family a bit too affluent, considering his circumstances. For me, however, the actors playing Tiny Tim and Fred, Scrooge's nephew are so distracting and so giddy, I can hardly stand to watch them. I suppose the screenwriters felt they were better storytellers than Dickens.

There's plenty of adaptations of A Christmas Carol out there and it's likely that, if you're going to delve into Christmas past, you may get no further than the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim. However, this one from 13 years earlier is also worthy of a look, even if it does take a few liberties with the story. I'm of the opinion that there's little point deviating too much from the source, as A Christmas Carol might just be the greatest spec script in English literature. Perfectly paced and with endless quotable dialogue, it really shouldn't be too hard to get a serviceable movie out of an adaptation. Perhaps that's why my biggest problems with this version are when it deviates from the source; such as Scrooge sacking Cratchett on Christmas Eve (making Bob Cratchett's toast to him the following day utterly bizarre), or the fact that Tiny Tim seems remarkably healthy for someone who has few Christmasses in their future. The largest oversight is the absence of Scrooge's lost-love Belle from the story, perhaps because it's the biggest indication of just why the old man is so bitter and miserly. Curiously, despite omitting this character, there's a bigger role for Fred's partner (his fiancée in this, rather than his wife). Why the film decides to focus on this couple without counter-balancing it with Scrooge's own sad love-story is a bit of a mystery. Aside from that, it's really not too bad. It tells the story well and doesn't look nearly as old as it actually is. But in a world of countless versions of this story, it is a little forgettable - neither bad enough to stick in the mind, nor interesting enough to join the ranks of Sim, Scott and the Muppets.