Weekend Double Feature: Charles Dickens Classics

Welcome to the Fancast Weekend Double Feature! Free movies, free fun, and you’ve got the best seat in the house - your house. Sit back, relax and take in some classic movies.

This is the last weekend before Christmas, so it’s time to trot out the classics. Charles Dickens created what is likely the greatest Christmas story ever told in A Christmas Carol, which gets the animated treatment here. Then, we present the 2002 live-action adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, one of the author’s most complex works.

But first, check out some Coming Attractions!

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NOW PLAYING:

A Christmas Carol

Dickens’ perennial holiday favorite cautionary tale about the dangers of harboring a miserly heart and contempt for humanity shows us the grizzled Ebenezer Scrooge (voiced by Simon Callow) as he’s visited by the spirit of his late business partner Jacob Marley (Nicolas Cage). This heralds a harrowing night for Mr. Scrooge, as three more ghosts appear to him to show him the error of his ways. The Ghost of Christmas Past (Jane Horrocks) shows him in painful detail how he drove away the love of his life, Belle (Kate Winslet). The Ghost of Christmas Present (Michael Gambon) shows him the life of his big-hearted employee Bob Cratchit (Rhys Ifans) and how Scrooge’s stingy ways force this family to suffer. Then… there’s The Ghost of Christmas Future, with the most unsettling vision of all.

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Nicholas Nickleby

Charlie Hunnam stars in the title role as a 19-year-old man who suddenly becomes the patriarch of his family once his father dies, leaving them penniless after bad business dealings. In an effort to take care of his mother (Stella Gonet) and younger sister Kate (Romola Garai), he turns to his Uncle Ralph (Christopher Plummer), an unscrupulous man who puts Nicholas to work in a boarding school that is more like a prison, and who subjects Kate to the lecherous attentions of Sir Mulberry Hawk (Edward Fox), an old client with whom he is trying to secure a business relationship. Nicholas’ rebellion against his uncle’s machinations leads to an out-and-out war of wills between the noble young man and his ruthless uncle, who revenges himself on Nicholas by kidnapping his new young love Madeline (Anne Hathaway) and forcing her to marry Hawk in place of Kate. What horrors the rich inflict upon the poor!

MORE MOVIES:

See what’s on tap this weekend nationwide and in carefully selected theaters.

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