[4] A huge cast of seasoned British and Irish stage and film actors was assembled to play the dozens of roles, including Simon Dormandy, Joan Greenwood, Roshan Seth, Miriam Margolyes, Cyril Cusack and Max Wall.

[12] BFI's Screenonline described the filmmaking in detail: Filmed mainly in close and medium shot, its scenes tend to focus intently on one or two characters, the dark interiors and moody lighting evoking a sense of oppression.

The theatricality and stylisation are quite deliberate, signalled by Edzard's choice of Verdi for the music soundtrack, full of tragic grandeur and operatic fatalism, but used sparingly, along with birdsong, ticking clocks, and faint sounds from outside.In the eerily quiet interior scenes a tiny movement or gesture, like dropping a shawl, can have a seismic effect.

Occasionally, the long conversation pieces are broken, quite brilliantly, by sudden bursts of activity in the wider world - the print shops around St. Paul's, the bridge where Amy meets Arthur, the public areas of the Marshalsea - where a noisy, purposeful crowd will appear, bustling before the fixed camera.

The six hour length and two-part structure defy box-office norms and, unlike the pictorialism of more typical British period filmmaking, this is not a seductive version of Victorian England.

[12] Some thought her omittance of the novel's melodramatic character – Rigaud – was a serious one which ran the risk of reducing Dickens' allegorical dialectic of good and evil to simply a satire with a love story.

"[18] Little Dorrit was critically acclaimed and was nominated for two Oscars: Actor in a Supporting Role (Alec Guinness), and Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) (Christine Edzard).

"[23] The New York Times wrote "The cast is spectacular" and "The film's physical production must be one of the handsomest, most evocative ever given a Dickens novel, and the performances, by some of Britain's finest character actors, are as rich in baroque detail as anyone could hope".

The reviewer found the repetition of the double perspective "exhausting", but concluded "One must cherish the late Joan Greenwood as Arthur's terrible mother; Miriam Margolyes as Flora Finching (who speaks in woozily hilarious, nonstop paragraphs instead of phrases or even sentences);... Roshan Seth as the rent collector, Pancks, and Eleanor Bron as Mrs. Merdle, the social-climbing wife of Britain's financial wizard-of-the-moment.

[26] In addition, minor roles were played by: Michael Elphick, Arthur Blake, Eleanor Bron, Heathcote Williams, John Savident, Betty Marsden, Liz Smith, Brian Pettifer, Kathy Staff, Ian Hogg, Tony Jay, Julia Lang, Christopher Hancock, Malcolm Tierney, John Warner, Harold Innocent, Edward Burnham, Gerald Campion, Nadia Chambers and David Thewlis.