mauricio-madrid again,Les Miserables was a huge book, and it is very hard to adapt, and i get it, things have to be changed, but, 30 minutes wouldn't have hurt it,and with that i mean, it would have been more emotive show Jean Valjean's death, not just end it with Javert's suicide.Well, at the end this movie it's a great movie that, if it is not close to the story events, at the end it is to the novel's atmosphere.The characters are played really well, Geoffrey Rush Kills it as Javert, playing him perfectly, Liam Neeson was Great as Valjean, Claire Danes did a great addition to Cosette's Character, making her stronger.The script is well articulated, The photography is beautiful and the acting is terrific.this is one of the best adaptations of Victor Hugo's Novel.

rogerdob This version is a classic example of movie makers who take a classic story and a classic film and turn their version into something that's "important." This always results in giving us a movie that is nothing like the original story. The narrative in this version jumps all over the place. This is a lot of real "serious" acting taking place (or so the actors would like to think so!). There's also a lot of real serious sounding music.And please, do we need so many ultra-extreme facial closeups of the actors?. Does the director think we are watching this movie on our smartphones? No we are watching this either on a huge movie screen or on our large widescreen HD TV's!

Will McGonagle Often times people compare this movie to the book or the Broadway. If you are going to do that, you might as well not even watch it. This movie is a simplified rendition of the book and, besides the setting, characters, and basic plot, is nothing like the book or the Broadway. I recommend that you enjoy this movie for what it is and do not try to compare it to its other versions.This movie is one of the best movies ever made. It has all the best parts of a great movie. Action, love, redemption, suspense, a great music score, a despicable evil villain, a plot twist, sheer emotion, and it give an insight into the past and some of the social problems that existed. If this movie was an original work it probably would have been one of the best of all time, but since it varies from the book, which has a loyal following of its own, it has been overlooked.

MisterWhiplash No, it doesn't have singing. What Billie August's Les Miserables does have, about the decades long 'chase' between ex-convict Jean Valjean and super-cop Javert,is really strong acting across the board, and what one might call 'handsomely mounted' production style, so it can be gritty, but it almost has the feel of a film from the 40's or 50's, only a little more modern. What I mean to say is I respect this on its own level, not quite like the 2012 film, though they each have their own merits and faults. But especially here, I loved Rush as Javert, a man who is so beholden to the ideal of the law that it buries him, ultimately. I could go on comparing the 2012 and 1998 films, and I want to try to avert it, except to say that I just preferred the story here, how it was told simply, no frills (and no romantic-love triangle just plain romantic interest between Marius and Cosette, the latter being more of a character than in the musical far as I could tell). For people like Valjean and Fantine, they each work their own ways in musical/dramatic film, so on that point it's not totally fair to compare. But I love Neeson as Valjean, and I love Thurman (albeit without a Dream to Dream) as Fatine. And I was blown away by the ending, with the closure coming for both characters within the same locale. While the film may ultimately be TOO handsomely mounted in a way, or maybe the music is not super imaginative here, the story shone through here, and I could see the actors doing so much, under August's direction (and this is a guy who's done Ingmar Bergman so the man knows his character one-on-one drama), to elevate the melodrama into something potent and, for me, true. When Valjean and Javert have their face-offs, across the board they are convincing, tension-filled, but illuminating the moral dilemmas that both characters come across in the course of events. And there's plenty of subtlety to go around too. So, to recommend it would depend: do you want to see a, yes, condensed adaptation of the big-epic Hugo book, with big Hollywood stars and lots of money poured into sets and extras and squalor and... Oh, that's out now in theaters as well? It's a tough call, and you'll have to come to both modern versions both your own way. For me, I'd be interested to see any version of this compelling tale, but at the end of the day, I go for August's professionally drawn, classically shot but deeply felt direction, because, overall, for the medium of film it works.