Great Expectations (1998 film) Great Expectations (1998 film) Great Expectations is a 1998 contemporary film adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel of the same name, co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Hank Azaria, Robert De Niro, Anne Bancroft and Chris Cooper. It is known for having moved the setting of the original novel from 1812-1827 London to 1990s New York. The film is an abridged modernization of Dickens's 1861 novel, with the hero's name having also been changed from Pip to Finn, and the character Miss Havisham has been renamed Nora Dinsmoor. The film received mixed reviews. Ten-year-old
Great Expectations (1974 film) one actress the whole way through'. Brian McFarlane, writing in a 2008 study of screen adaptations of "Great Expectations", criticised the film for its tendency to give way to 'clichés of sentimentality' and assured the director, who had expressed a hope that people wouldn't feel the necessity of comparing it with David Lean's version that, 'he need not have worried: no one would have spoken of them in the same breath. It's not just Lean's film with which it would not stand comparison but with several superior TV mini-series too'. McFarlane expressed some admiration however for Margaret Leighton's interpretation of