The Goldfinch (2019)

I can't imagine many people enjoying this if they haven't read Donna Tartt's 780-page brick, and I can just as easily imagine many who have read it resenting the way the film glosses over all those pages and withholds the emotional keystone of the whole until the very final frame - but with expectations low from scathing reviews, I ended up thoroughly enjoying this adaptation, which, like the book, is a bewildering mass of underdeveloped themes, impossible coincidence, and meaningless allusions to the Harry Potter universe, yet still a strangely loveable, unwieldy, flawed beast that just is - who knows how or why Donna Tartt wrote it.

★★★★☆

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The Mask of Dimitros (1944)

What many say is Eric Ambler's best book is adapted faithfully here to the big screen with Peter Lorre in the lead role as the detective writer Leyden who becomes obsessed with chronicling the life of a murder victim washed up on a beach in Istanbul - Dimitrios Makropoulos, whom Leyden discovers, as he journeys across Europe and Asia talking with the dead man's victims, was a swindler, a spy, assassin, forger, drug dealer,  blackmailer, grifter, thief, and, in the book, even a human trafficker!

★★★★☆

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The Child In Time (2017)

Ian McEwan's book, when I read it, was a gnarly knot of plots held together not by sense nor a desire to entertain a reader but seemingly by a want to be clever about the theme of childhood and Time, and certainly some of the threads of his book - a child lost in a moment, a successful first time writer whose bestseller is mistaken for a children's book, a friend who is reverting to childhood, and a government enacting policy regarding child literacy - are interesting, most included here, but even in this adaptation, the tone is heavy, droll, haughty, and like the book, the movie is smug, joyless and left me wondering whether the point is simply recognising the author's smarts.

★★☆☆☆

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Agatha Christie "Marple": The Sittaford Mystery (2006)

Despite not really fitting the image I have in my head of the character, Geraldine McEwan is a good Miss Marple - shrew and mischevious, her eyes positively twinkle as she contemplates twisted human psychology and murder, so much that you can forgive her spritely frame and impish energy - and even though she has been thrust into this adaptation of a book she didn't even appear in, she adds good value to the story, quietly solving a murder that takes place in a snowed-in inn populated with a star-studded array of likely suspects (Carey Mulligan, Timothy Dalton, Mel Smith, James Murray, and more, in a scenario very reminiscent to the one in The Mousetrap).

★★★☆☆

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八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) ('Village of Eight Graves') (1977)

Author Seishi Yokomizo's convoluted mystery has thankfully been trimmed of several characters and the action streamlined in this ripper adaptation of his book, which connects sixteenth-century feudal events in Japan to a modern-day Japanese murder mystery in the village of Yatsuhakamura (Village of Eight Graves) and, though a mystery, it enthusiastically embraces horror — the body count is exorbitant, there's a chilling link to the real-life 1938 Tsuyama incident, and scenes of maniacal villains chasing victims through labyrinthine limestone caves amid ghastly 70s giallo stylings.

★★★★☆

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Island of Hell (aka 'Devil's Island', 'Gokumon-tou', 'Hell's Gate Island' (獄門島) (1977)

Ichikawa Kon's 1977 adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel is faithful to the book except in its final moments when whodunnit is revealed and it is whodidntdunnit in the book, a change which will rankle fans of the classic mystery featuring the recurring, dandruff-suffering, scruffy detective Kindaichi Kousuke; meanwhile, non-Japanese speakers also will be frustrated by breakneck cutting, which makes it hard to enjoy the movie's Japanese sets, costuming, and its plot while also keeping up with lightning-speed subtitles. 

★★★☆☆

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Appearances (Les Apparences) (2020)

I've never heard of the Swedish crime author Karin Alvtegena but here one of her books, Betrayal, is adapted for the screen and it is a mostly compelling psychological drama (although one messily over-plotted with a crime hurried in at the end) with a terrific lead performance by Karin Viard as the wife of an orchestra conductor, who 'keeps up appearances' after she discovers her husband has betrayed her. 

★★★☆☆

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The Pledge (2001)

The trouble with director Sean Penn's mostly-gripping The Pledge, about a cop who promises a grieving mother to find the killer of her child, is not Jack Nicholson's gnarlier-than-usual detective (compare him with the clean-cut Foyle-like turns of It Happened In Broad Daylight's Heinz Rührmann and Cold Light of Day's Richard E Grant) nor the story's movement from the Swiss Alps to Nevada, but Penn's muddling Dürrenmatt's screenplay - a jaunty mystery with a detective-novel ending - with the author's later book, "The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel, which refashions that screenplay's plot into a much darker existential drama; Penn borrows scenes from the earlier 1958 adaptation and incorporates aspects of the screenplay (such as a sequence that demystifies the serial killer), and so detracts from the book's grim philosophy.

★★★☆☆

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Jane Eyre (2011)

Comparison is more than fair: this 2011 adaptation is filmed in the same location (and often in the very same rooms), is based on the same screenplay, and is frequently a scene-by-scene copy of the BBC four-episode TV series of 2009, so the question is why this Cary Joji Fukunaga-directed adaptation, which gives painstaking attention to realising the look and feel of Charlotte Bronte's novel, chops the story to pieces, starting in the middle, unnecessarily, and lurching unevenly through the events of Eyre's life, either glossing over or entirely deleting key moments from the book AND the BBC TV series with the end result a visually-, aurally-pleasing video clip zapped of most of the story's romance and emotion.

★★★☆☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

Victor Frankenstein's experiments are given a David Copperfield jazz-magic vibe that I don't think Mary Shelley intended but by far the biggest deviation of this mostly faithful adaptation is the fact the monster is a re-creation, not a creation - Robert De Niro is a resuscitated organ recipient, - scarred but not a hideous daemon - with prior knowledge, not a birthling - probably because it isn't easy to translate to the screen Mary Shelley's caginess regarding Frankenstein's methods of bestowing life upon the inanimate (pretty much in the book a man says the word, 'galvanisation' and then a big yellow eye opens); there's also fewer deaths in a rushed ending: once this movie's grand climax is revealed (an inspired gothic moment that repulses and horrifies and finally hits the right note) the movie decouples from the book, turning into about seven minutes years of Frankenstein's madness and incarceration and anguish, as if everyone has tired of the whole exercise and wants simply to sail prematurely home.

★★★☆☆

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The Sense of an Ending (2017)

This movie adaptation of Julian Barnes' Man Booker prize-winning The Sense Of An Ending is as enjoyable a watch as the book is a read but with both, after you've shrugged at the end, you're left with the distinct Sense that the story was kept deliberately ambiguous because to have stated things outright would have been to reveal it to be a mere sordid sex drama...and anyway, the source of the ambiguity, ostensibly the heart of the story - that self-interested men are unreliable narrators - really only extends to main character Tony Webster's postcard- and/or letter-writing because after that, the story shifts to poor scapegoat Adrian and his life story far too closely mirroring too many others' (that of an unfortunate classmate, for one, and Tony Webster's own life, similar in far too many respects).

★★★★☆

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The Blind Side (2009)

In this adaptation of Michael (Moneyball, The Big Short) Lewis' based-on-fact book, a woman (Sandra Bullock) takes in a homeless student, real-life Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), and helps him carve out an education and a future in sport, but while the first half pulls at heartstrings with its Christian saviour story and the second half occasionally amuses with its cameo-laden comedic look at the NFL college draft, what you realise by the end is that Oher himself is missing - a physical presence in the film but little more than a mere shape, a centrepiece for a whole lot of other people's busy-ness and noise around the table.

★★☆☆☆

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The 100 Year-Old Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared (2013)

Forrest Gump spouted his mother's life lessons and walked innocently, gormlessly through some of the 20th Century's most momentous historical occasions and so does Allan Karlsson, the 100 year-old birthday boy and 'Swedish Forrest Gump' of Jonas Jonasson's 2009 book adapted here into this movie which starts with good humour as Allan wanders out of his retirement home and embarks on an adventure involving a suitcase full of cash, a growing body count, and explosions, but quickly runs out of energy as the reenacted moments in history and the encounters with thugs become repetitive and the investigation into Allan's disappearance stalls and the absurd developments become more and more predictable.

★★☆☆☆

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Christine (1983)

Pretty much, Carrie (CAR-rie) comes back as a 1958 Plymouth Fury in this Stephen King adaptation that has director John Carpenter doing his horror-movie best with the Horror Novel King's big, ugly and empty story about a vehicle whose gender is ascribed by men and whose unexplained sentience, jealousy and murderous nature serves only to eclipse the psychopathy of the movie's real monsters, those men themselves: ugly, knife-wielding, sniggering, self-loathing, cigar-chomping, bullying and friendless, gambling and drinking, erection-obsessed and female-objectifying boys aged 15 to 80.

★★★☆☆

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The Woman In The Window (2020)

The plot of A J Finn's book was tailored for fans of the classic film thrillers of the 30s and 40s and 50s — essentially a string of all the especially twisty-turny bits of Hitchcock's The Lady Vamishes and Rear Window mixed with the memorable moments of other noir thrillers like Witness To Murder — but what the book lacks and what this adaptation dutifully lacks is any masterful thriller storytelling: there is no clever pacing or building of suspense or deft shifts in tone, just a relentless, frenetically paced string of twists and, like the book, the movie is filled not with characters but mere shapes who all speak with A J Finn's voice and dart around with the same urgency and at the same speed, driving the story to its end before you've even started to distinguish between these blobs.

★★☆☆☆

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Enola Holmes (2020)

The sister of the famous Baker Street detective, a character dreamt up by author Nancy Springer for a series of teen detective novels, is brought up outside the conventions of turn-of-the-century Britain and so as a young adult is perfectly equipped with the sass, street-smarts and probing scientific mind needed to solve a mystery - her mother disappears and a Marquess disappears and our hero, Enola, embarks on a rollicking, satisfying (well, mostly...not including the underdeveloped plot thread regarding Helena Bonham Carter's character) adventure through a London on the cusp of a sweeping social change.

★★★★☆

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The Dry (2021)

The leads in this mystery - Eric Bana, Genevieve O'Reilly, and Matthew Nable - are terrific, as is the evocation of drought-stricken rural AustralIa (with scenes making me audibly gasp as they transported me back to the local pub, shop, dry creekbed, the local copper, and the locals of my Australian country-town upbringing) but I've read Jane Harper's The Lost Man and now I've seen The Dry and what doesn't rise up to the level of the actors and the photography is Harper's mystery, because like the plot of The Lost Man, this movie's mystery ends with a shrug, like you didn't realise you were just watching an episode of Cop Shop because it was dressed up like Picnic At Hanging Rock.

★★★☆☆

The Quiet American (2002)

The Quiet American

"They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived," says the central character of Graham Greene's book, played here by Michael Caine, Thomas Fowler, an English reporter in Vietnam whom it is very hard not to think of as Graham Greene himself because like Fowler, Graham Greene sat at The Continental Hotel in Saigon overlooking Lam Son Square writing articles for The Times about the breakdown of French colonialism in the north of Vietnam, and the fact this adaptation, one more loyal to the book's political angle than the 1959 original adaptation, is able to seamlessly blend Greene's fiction (a love story and political thriller) into actual world history shows just how acute an eye for human nature and world politics Greene developed as he lived his Vietnam experience.

★★★★☆

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The Spiral Staircase (1975)

The 1946 movie made a few changes to the Ethel Lina White book (the heroine, Helen, was rendered mute from trauma, the lunatic's motivations were simplified and so made easier to deal with in a quick 83 minutes, and the truly diabolical characters of Nurse Barker and Lady Warren were sanitised) and this 1975 made-for-tv remake of that movie further distances itself from the book by making even more changes, and dopey ones like heavy-handed signposting of the killer's identity and motives, an unnecessary extrapolation of Helen's trauma by way of repetitive flashbacks, and several more murders, at least one of which doesn't even fit the story.

★★☆☆☆

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