Highly enjoyable. It plays quite fast and loose with the plot and the emphasis is on the lighter aspects of the novel, but the performances are all very vivid and engaging, particularly Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, and Peter Capaldi. The colour-blind casting was super - in one sense I didn’t notice it at all and yet in another it was very prominent but somehow made it better; difficult to explain how. The starry cast are all excellently suited to their roles and there is just enough of each actor’s unique characteristics to give the roles an interesting twist. The one character who had some real darkness was Ben Wishaw as Uriah Heep; in a way his performance seemed to be from a different sort and style of film but it was very darkly impressive.
I liked the idea of using the framing device of Copperfield himself doing, a la Dickens, a public reading of his story. It was quite self-consciously self-referential in terms of being cinema but never to the extent that ot became irritating and self-indulgent - it just, periodically drew attention to the fact that we were being told a story on many different levels. This was established from the opening where the adult David was an observer of his early life. - which, in a way, as narrator, he is of course.
Recommended.