Colourful, captivating and preposterously delightful, Armando Iannucci’s free-spirited adaptation of the Dickens novel brings a vibrant contemporary energy to the classic metronomic rags to riches to rags to riches tale.

Chronicling his turbulent upbringing, the film begins with a quintessentially Dickensian framing device as David Copperfield (Dev Patel) narrates his own life story to a packed…