REVIEW: Ebenezer - Depp is pretty much the perfect Scrooge...

Does the world really need yet another version of A Christmas Carol? Well, actually, yes – especially when it is as good as this.

How fitting that in the 75th anniversary year of the classic 1951 Alastair Sim version, we have finally got a new take on Dickens’ tale that can stand proudly alongside it, absolutely in the same league – as time will surely tell.

Walking out at the end, you immediately feel that this is a retelling that we will all happily watch again and again over Christmases yet to come.

The great strength of the Christmas Carol story is that it is a story which has lent itself to so many different adaptations down the years and survived them all, from funky updates to cartoons, from puppets and spoofs to goodness knows what.

But the great virtue of Ebenezer, maybe its great bravery, is that it tells the tale pretty much straight, giving Johnny Depp the opportunity to be pretty much the perfect Scrooge in a very largely faithful retelling.

The few variations we get are wholly in the spirit and work well. It’s an interesting take that we get to meet Jacob Marley (excellent from Ian McKellen) on the night he dies, before whizzing forward seven years to the fateful night of Dickens’ tale.

More variations come in the final chapter (What? No one gets sent to get a goose!) But the variations work well, and in between times, we get the tale exactly as it should be, Depp superb in the role – terrific as the skinflint, touching as his hard heart starts to melt and hugely engaging as he embarks on his new life as a changed man.

The spirits are beautifully done, respectively Andrea Riseborough, Tramell Tillman and Robert Strange; Rupert Grint eases nicely into the role of his long-suffering clerk Bob Cratchit, and Sam Claflin is great as his nephew Fred, just about the only person to refuse to give up on his mean old uncle.

Screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern and director Ti West conjure a suitably Dickensian London for the whole thing to unfurl in – and the whole thing just flies. A great reworking of a genuinely great Christmas story, with some terrific Gothic flourishes, surely pushing it to the limit of its 12A certificate. Poor old Fezziwig…