Nicholas Nickleby (2003)

Hunnam, scrubbed and blond and bland, plays the title role in Douglas McGrath's adaptation of the Dickens masterpiece. Young Nickleby, buoyed by a misfit bunch of fiercely loyal friends, is a fatherless 19-year-old battling a cruel world. And wouldn't you know it -- his foes are more interesting than our band of heroes. Plummer is fun as a toxic benefactor, but Juliet Stevenson, who plays a beast of a schoolmarm, gives an otherwise mild-mannered movie some real bite. EXTRAS Superfluous. In conversations with the cast and crew, we learn this actor is delightful, that actress has quite a future, and Dickens wrote like a dream.