Great expectations

When the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón announced that his next project would be a seven-part adaptation of Renée Knight’s novel Disclaimer, it was met with a mixture of excitement and surprise. Excitement, because anything that Cuarón involves himself with tends to be an event; surprise, because after a series of high-profile recent projects that have included everything from a near-experimental sci-fi blockbuster (Gravity) to a black-and-white Mexican drama he shot himself (Roma), it seemed almost mundane, rather as if Stanley Kubrick, at the peak of his success, had decided to make a movie out of a Harold Robbins potboiler.

When Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aired on FX in 2019, it was very quickly decided that, whatever it was, it wasn’t Dickens. From Guy Pearce’s foul-mouthed Scrooge to a scene in which Mrs. Cratchit strips and offers Ebenezer sex in exchange for money to buy the medicine she needs for her son Tiny Tim, it was a strange combination of would-be gritty social realism and hysterical prurience. It was not well-received in the United States: Salon’s comment that it was “short on joy and very, very, very long on purgatorial slogging” was typical.