If ever there was a case tailor-made for the crack Reverse Shot team, Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist may have been it. Alas, by the time our rapid response units reached the scene, it was too late—the corpse had been moved, witnesses had all fled to greenlight the next big studio abortion, and the trail was cold. And thus, a $50-million dollar internationally co-produced “prestige picture” by one of the world’s foremost filmic auteurs was left for dead in a waste bin, mustering a gross so meager that a flock of flightless birds easily pissed all over it from a great height. Debate the relative merits of March of the Penguins (for my money, largely useless, but featuring some of the more sensual lovemaking of the year) all you like, but what’s most depressing here is how inept the old guard has become at drawing crowds for this type of now unfashionable and “high concept” enveloping, literary cinema which once upon a time represented a solid portion of their bottom line.

So few people saw Roman Polanski’s new movie on the big screen that you’d think theaters were offering the Black Death with the purchase of each ticket. Those who did muster up the courage were treated to a true rarity: a film by someone who knows how to make movies and has been proving it repeatedly for years, regardless of the attention being paid him. Oliver Twist is a work of unimpeachable integrity and relentless craftsmanship—an obvious labor of love built up around an easy familiarity with the fundamentals of storytelling that is no less “Polanski” than any of his other works and no less an investigation into psychological shellshock than his rightly lauded The Pianist. That the meeting of two classics like Charles and Roman wasn’t cause for hullabaloo is no fault of theirs, or their movie, as all parties involved came ready to play. Blame Sony—they had a bad year, but if they’d taken half the money they spent on Stealth or Beauty Shop and applied it to Oliver, the former pair would have still tanked mightily, while the latter, and moviegoers, would have most definitely come out ahead.