The 53 best book-to-film adaptations ever, ranked

Film: 1972
Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Mario Puzo himself assisted on the screenplay for Coppola’s classic. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the film stays faithful to the manner and quality of the book. Some backstories are eliminated, while others appear in The Godfather II. The ending of the film is actually more gloomy than the book. But both film and book complement each other perfectly.

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Film: 1991
Director: Jonathan Demme

That The Silence of the Lambs is a great movie goes without saying – it won the Big Five (best film; best director; best actor/actress and best writing) at the Oscars. But it’s also a wonderfully sympathetic reworking of Harris’s original text. The horrific themes in Harris’s book are handled in a subtle and taut fashion.

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Film: 1962
Director: Robert Mulligan

If Harper Lee’s epoch-defining novel is about tolerance and compassion in the face of hatred and violence, then Robert Mulligan’s adaptation has it spot on. The casting of Gregory Peck as the heroic Atticus Finch is pitch perfect, while Scout and Jem, the book’s central protagonists, fare equally well. A truly fantastic film of a fantastic book.

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Film: 1999
Director: David Fincher

Critics often attack Hollywood for castrating a book’s central premise or diluting its message so as to garner a bigger audience. This was not the case with Fight Club. Writer Chuck Palahniuk himself has applauded Fincher’s adaptation – while acknowledging that some simplifying had to take place. Fight Club presaged a decade of magazine articles debating man’s emasculation. It was visceral, inflammatory and, above all, entertaining. A brilliant book, and film.

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Film: 1975
Director: Miloš Forman

Before The Silence of the Lambs scooped the Oscar’s Big Five, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the last film to achieve such a laudable feat. Forman’s reworking of Ken Kesey’s anti-authoritarian book is a stunning piece of cinema. Kesey claimed to have hated it, despite never allegedly never seeing it. Whatever, the film is hypnotic from beginning to end.

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Film: 2007
Director: The Coen brothers

Like Dickens before him, Cormac McCarthy’s rich, multi-layered books are tailor-made for cinematic adaptation. That doesn’t mean that bringing them to life is an easy process – the Coen Brothers had to streamline the plot of the grand No Country For Old Men, but the result was film gold.

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Film: Stand By Me, 1986
Director: Rob Reiner

This archetypal coming-of-age movie from Rob Reiner began as a Stephen King novella in the same collection as the tales that were later adapted as Apt Pupil and The Shawshank Redemption. Although as American as apple pie (lots of which is regurgitated in the film), the universal themes of childhood, loss of innocence and looking back upon such times with acceptable nostalgia strike a chord with everyone.

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Film: 2019
Director: Greta Gerwig

Innumerable TV and movie adaptations of Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women have been attempted over the years. But Greta Gerwig’s 2019 version is comfortably the best. It’s effortless and playful, painting the relationships of the March family sisters without dipping into the saccharine sentimentality that has given several earlier versions an unwanted aftertaste. The cast is superb too. Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen play the sisters. And both Laura Dern and Timothee Chalamet shine in supporting roles.

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Film: 2000
Director: Mary Harron

Ellis’s novel skewers the vapidity at the heart of contemporary American culture with alarming accuracy – Harron’s film is slightly more comedic, and is a hugely enjoyable romp with a magnificent central performance from Christian Bale. A three-in-a-bed-violent-death romp, if you will.

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Dune is a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen. It is a stunning adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel, with director Denis Villeneuve cementing himself as one of the greatest sci-fie directors around. The movie showcases the first part of the novel, introducing us to Paul Atreides and his family who are entrusted with protecting a planet that has the most precious thing in the galaxy on it - spice. It has been confirmed that there will be a Part Two of the movie, which is fantastic news.

Film: Goodfellas, 1990
Director: Martin Scorsese

Wiseguy, by journalist Nicolas Pileggi, is a celebrated work of non-fiction that told the story of mobster-turned-FBI informant Henry Hill and his life in and around the Lucchese family for 25 years. Martin Scorsese, who knew this subject intimately, was the ideal director to bring this fascinating story to life. His film, retitled Goodfellas, is possibly the greatest gangster movie of all time.

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One of the most spell-binding adaptations of a book series ever, Peter Jackson's Lord Of the Rings is a stunning trilogy that more than does the book justice. Despite being over 20 years old now, the effects still make your jaw drop and if you really want to go the distance, then the Extended Editions are the only way.

Film: Apocalypse Now, 1979
Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola’s hallucinatory meditation on the Vietnam War has its roots in Joseph Conrad’s colourful novella Heart of Darkness. Set at the end of the 19th Century in the Belgian Congo and concerned with ivory transporter Marlow’s obsession with ivory trader Kurtz, the book explores multiple themes such as colonialism and racism. While Coppola’s film is more sprawling it certainly addresses these concerns.

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Film: Blade Runner, 1982
Director: Ridley Scott

Blade Runner is very loosely based on Dick’s cult novel, but Ridley Scott’s dystopian sci-fi thriller is a film for all ages, thanks to a stunning ensemble cast led by Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer and Sean Young. The long-gestating 2017 sequel successfully recreates the magic.

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Film: 1980
Director: Stanley Kubrick

It’s well known that Kubrick was fast and loose with Stephen King’s source material – King himself wasn’t initially impressed with Kubrick’s picture, a stance that seems to have softened with time. However, however, however… that is not to deny the brilliance of Kubrick’s chilling, mesmerising and alarming film. As a faithful adaptation of a book, it’s pretty risible, but as an iconic piece of cinema it’s superb.

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Film: 1997
Director: Curtis Hanson

L.A. Confidential was the novel that finally saw James Ellroy compared to the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, those arbiters of hard boiled fiction. Hanson’s reworking of Ellroy’s gritty and at times labyrinthine page-turner restructured the plot, but kept the book’s soul. In doing so, he reinvented film noir for the dying embers of the 20th Century.

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Film: 2009
Director: Niels Arden Oplev

Superior to David Fincher’s 2011 Hollywood remake, this is an unsettling film that executes its distressing motives superbly by paying close attention to Steig Larsson’s alarming book. Some scenes are taken from later books in Larsson’s Millennium Series, but this in no way undermines the excellence of Oplev’s taut thriller.

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Film: 1996
Director: Danny Boyle

Staying faithful to Irvine Welsh’s intense and graphic book wouldn’t have served the interests of film. So it’s to Danny Boyle’s credit that he brings alive Welsh’s ragtag collection of misfit dreamers, ferocious drunks and comedic chancers in an Edinburgh blighted by heroin addiction. It sounds remarkable now, but Welsh had made fiction cool again when he penned this, ahem, addictive book: Boyle, assisted by Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Kelly McDonald and co, did the same for film. They came as close with the 2017 sequel to recapturing lightning in a bottle as anyone ever manages.

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Film: 2005
Director: Ang Lee

When her 1997 short story was filmed by Ang Lee, author Anne Proulx proclaimed: “I may be the first writer in America to have a piece of writing make its way to the screen whole and entire.” Moreover, the end product is an exceptional piece of cinema: a love story, which happens to be between two men but speaks to the doomed romantic in everyone.

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Film: 1995
Director: Ang Lee

Sense & Sensibility was Jane Austen’s first published novel: an unabashed romantic novel, with a side order of biting social critique, Ang Lee’s adaptation remained resolutely faithful to the mores of the early 19th Century, while fusing it with accepted Hollywood practices. Emma Thompson penned the screenplay and starred alongside Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant in what is accepted as the best Austen adaptation to date.

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Film: 1993
Director: James Ivory

James Ivory might move the time period slightly in his adaptation of Kazou Ishiguro’s celebrated novel from the 1930s to the 1920s, but this is a sterling treatment. The tone is exquisite, capturing the ideas of dignity, service and loyalty impeccably. Like the novel, the film’s depiction of an England at a crossroads between modernity and aristocracy is unforgettable.

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Film: 2017
Director: Andy Muschietti

We already had a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s IT, before ths film. The Tim Curry take on the book’s killer clown Pennywise is regarded as one of the all-time-great horror performances. But the 2017 film is a better watch all-round, and went on to become the highest grossing horror movie of all time. It took over $700 million at the box office.

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Film: 1939
Director: David O. Selznick

In truth it would have been a folly not to include this Tinseltown classic. Margaret Mitchell’s novel ran to an incredible 1,037 pages and the film is similarly unstinting in its devotion to telling the story, clocking in at nearly four hours. This dramatic retelling of the events preceding, during and following the American Civil War is rightly feted. Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard shine like the Hollywood royalty that they were.

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Film: 2010
Director: The Coen brothers

The first adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel starred John Wayne and while noted for its excellence as a film, it certainly toned down the violent imagery and brutality in the book. The Coen brothers pay homage to the book by retaining much of the story; framing it squarely in the eyes of the original narrator Mattie Ross and ending the film like the book, 25 years after the events depicted. A marvellous film.

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Film: 1941
Director: John Huston

By the time first-time director Huston came to bring Hammett’s hard boiled classic to the screen, it had already been adapted twice. This version is the one that is remembered to this day, though. Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of the morally ambiguous private detective Sam Spade set in stone the idea of the enigmatic investigator, while the wise-crackin’ dialogue and iconic cinematography live on in the films of Tarantino, Scorsese et al.

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Film: 1930

Director: Lewis Milestone

Routinely referred to as the quintessential anti-war film, All Quiet on the Western Front draws heavily from Remarque’s similarly harrowing novel. Upon its release in 1930 – just a year after the book was published – it was regarded as a powerful statement of intent from the then fledgling movie industry. Its potency hasn’t dulled in the intervening years.

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Film: 2015
Director: Lenny Abrahamson

You are more likely to know Room the film rather than the 2010 book by Emma Donoghue. The movie won Best Director and Best Actor Oscars for Brie Larson and Lenny Abrahamson. And its story is a grim one. A woman is held captive in suburbia for seven years, and raises her son in this prison.

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Film: Babe, 1995
Director: Chris Noonan

Dick King-Smith’s charming story about a pig that proves to be the equal of any sheepdog was given the fantasy big screen treatment in 1995. Noonan encapsulated the spirit of the book in his magical film and in doing so could be held directly responsible for huge swathes of folk experimenting with vegetarianism in the mid-Nineties.

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Film: 1987
Director: Steven Spielberg

Although it didn’t set the box office alight upon its release in 1987, Steven Spielberg has consistently championed the merits of this adaptation of JG Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel. Spielberg argues this film is his best expression of the ‘loss of innocence’. The book, which charts a young boy’s adventures in a Japanese internment camp during World War 2, certainly deals with these issues.

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Film: 2020
Director: Autumn de Wilde

This 2020 version of Emma plays up the humour and bite of the source material, adhering a little less closely than some Austen-ites might like for a better on-screen effect. But much of the same spirit, and those period costumes, remains. It’s a film with real rhythm. Those up for an even looser take on Emma should not miss 1995’s Clueless, a near-perfect film, if not one quite closely tied to the book enough to make this list.

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Film: 2011
Director: Tomas Alfredson

When shown on television in 1979, the adaptation of John le Carré’s much-admired Cold War spy thriller ran to 315 minutes over seven episodes. How to squeeze that into a feature film? Well, Tomas Alfredson did it with aplomb. Gary Oldman is an inspired choice as the understated, stoic and anti-Bond George Smiley: the supporting cast – including Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt and Benedict Cumberbatch – just add extra excellence. Le Carré must have been happy with the result because he makes a cameo appearance.

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Film: 2000
Director: Darren Aronfsky

Both Selby, Jr’s novel and Aronfsky’s superb adaptation of it highlight the unending fallacy of the American Dream. The backdrop to these unattainable dreams is heroin addiction, and while the novel is perhaps harder hitting than the film, the latter’s dreamy, opiate-like quality makes it similarly absorbing.

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Film: 1993
Director: Martin Scorsese

In what remains his most uncharacteristic film to date – yes, even more so than Hugo – Martin Scorsese shines an uncomfortable light upon the romantic and societal practices of upper class life in New York in the 1870s. Edith Wharton’s classic novel is handled with subtlety and nuance from Scorsese and the leads – Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer – are uniformly entrancing.

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Stephen Spielberg is fantastic at taking pulpy books and making masterpieces out of them. The book of Jaws is just that: a dark, pulpy tale about a shark terrorising a small community. The main themes of the book are in the movie, but the film elevates everything far beyond the quality of the prose in the book. Where the characters are (ironically) underwritten in the novel, they shine on the big screen.

Film: 1946
Director: David Lean

There have been untold adaptations of Dickens novels, but this remains the benchmark. From the unforgettable opening scenes on the marshes to its all-star cast (Alec Guinness, John Mills, Jean Simmons and Martita Hunt’s haunting Miss Havisham), this is a spellbinding piece of cinema. It’s also a wonderful homage to the book – the themes of social change and honest endeavour remain at its core.

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Film: 1973
Director: Nicolas Roeg

Daphne du Maurier said that this and Alfred Hitchcock’s reworking of Rebecca were the only adaptations of hers that she had any time for. An ominous story of a husband and wife attempting to recover from the death of their daughter by staying in Venice, it reeks of menacing and barely disguised violence. A startling, terrifying film that lingers long in the memory.

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As he did with Jaws, Stephen Spielberg once more took on a pulpy book about a creature that terrorises humans, swapping out sharks for dinos. The book is... fine. But it has none of the emotional heft of the movie, none of the adrenaline rush, none of the wonder of the film. Spielberg adds his layer of brilliance to proceedings and (once again) crafts one of the best blockbusters ever made.

Film: 1946
Director: Howard Hawks

Hawks’s superb version of Raymond Chandler’s novel works for many reasons. Yes, the partnership of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Philip Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge is inspired, but it’s the manner in which all involved maintain the enigmatic core of Chandler’s book that really delights. Film noir at its finest and one of the best film adaptations ever.

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Film: 1969
Director: Ronald Neame

Muriel Spark’s remarkable novel detailing the vicious titular teacher was first turned into a play, from which Neame’s film was then made. The experimental nature of the book, which often flashed forward in time, was abandoned in favour of a more realistic narrative, but this wasn’t done at the expense of the book’s frightful and captivating story.

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Film: 1956
Director: John Huston

Long considered one of the great American novels, John Huston’s powerful vision of Herman Melville’s book is equally enduring. Gregory Peck mesmerises as the unbalanced Captain Ahab, while Orson Welles nearly steals the show with a wonderful cameo. There are some divergences between book and film, but fans of Melville’s tale generally applaud this bold and brilliant film.

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Film: 2012
Director: David O. Russell

A critical and commercial success, David O. Russell’s adaptation of Matthew Quick’s acclaimed debut novel is a rare and marvellous thing. A superlative and sympathetically handled adaptation – a fact that deserves mention because of the sensitive subject material of bipolar disorder – it surprises, entertains and provokes in equal measure. Bradley Cooper is astounding in a serious role, and Jennifer Lawrence demonstrates a maturity way beyond her years. A film that will wear well, and, hopefully, send viewers to Quick’s excellent book.

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Film: 1947
Director: John Boulting

Remade in 2010 with Sam Riley playing the dazzling antihero Pinkie, Greene’s book is constantly ripe for cinematic interpretation. It’s the 1947 version, though, that stands the test of time. Richard Attenborough sparkles as the psychopathic gangster, while the criminal underbelly of interwar Brighton is also brought chillingly to life.

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Film: 1935
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

There have been four film versions of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps: this, the first, by an ambitious director by the name of Alfred Hitchcock is without question the best. Perhaps not the most faithful to Buchan’s original book, but certainly the best. Hitchcock’s thrilling spy drama weaves a magical web of intrigue and suspense.

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Stephen King's novella is a beautifully written look at how having patience, hope and perseverance will help you succeed, no matter how dark the situation you find yourself in. The film version takes these themes - and the plot about a wrongly convicted person and there plight for freedom - and pins them to two of the best cast characters ever: Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne and Morgan Freeman as Red' (who was a ginger white man in the book). Stunning stuff.

Film: 1962
Director: Stanley Kubrick

One of the posters for Lolita, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious 1955 novel proclaimed: ‘How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?’. Indeed. The subject material – essentially paedophilia – had to be toned down in the censorious Sixties and much of the graphic sexual scenes contained in the book had to be implied on film. That Kubrick made such a colourful and provocative film is a testament to his genius behind the camera.

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Film: Jackie Brown, 1997
Director: Quentin Tarantino

Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino would appear a combustible mix on paper – either the latter’s adaptation of the former’s Rum Punch would be nothing short of brilliant; or, it would stink. Thankfully, it was the first version. Tarantino amended a few details – the name obviously, and the protagonist’s ethnicity, but, for an iconoclast he remained remarkably faithful to Leonard’s book. It pays handsome and stylish dividends.

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Film: The Personal History of David Copperfield, 2019
Director: Armando Iannucci

Solid gold satirist Armando Iannucci took a slightly unconventional approach to his 2019 adaptation of David Copperfield. Colourblind casting sees Dev Patel lead, an inspired choice. There’s a lot of joy in this film version too, even as several of the book’s characters fall into destitution. Breezy, bright and colourful, The Personal History of David Copperfield is worth streaming

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Film: 1939
Director: William Wyler

Laurence Olivier – the actor’s actor – portraying the brooding Heathcliff and the elegant Merle Oberon playing opposite him as Cathy are the pair that bring to life one of literature’s greatest (and doomed) love affairs. For brevity’s sake, Wyler omits the second half of Brontë’s masterpiece, but this adaptation captures all the gothic majesty of the book.

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Film: 2023
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

This Oscar-nominated movie is thought of predominantly as a work of auteur director Yorgos Lanthimos. But it is based on a novel by Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. Bella is brought to life, salvaged from the dead body of a woman who committed suicide. She begins childlike, but rapidly matures as she discovers the great and the awful in the world around her.

Film: 2023
Director: Jonathan Glazer

London Fields is perhaps Martin Amis’s best-known novel. But could The Zone of Interest change that? It was Amis’s second-last novel, and became an Oscar-winning film in 2023, directed by Jonathan Glazer. It’s a fictional look into the life of Rudolf Höss, who was a key figure in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi infrastructure. The film is set just outside the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Höss’s family live a relatively idyllic life just out of sight of the horror.

Film: The Green Knight, 202
Director: David Lowery

This arthouse fantasy movie isn’t based on a pulpy page-turner but a 14th century poem and published in 1839. Dev Patel is Gawain, a knight of the round table to must test his courage and take on the green knight. It’s dream-like, and touches on the horrific at times, conjuring a sense of the mystical in a way few fantasy films ever have. Directed by David Lowery, who made 2017’s A Ghost Story and, in a rather different vein, Peter’s Dragon.

Film: Kes, 1969
Director: Ken Loach

Barry Hines’s brutal yet sensitive handling of Billy Casper’s relationship with a kestrel is replicated in Ken Loach’s classic adaptation. There are no happy endings and no saccharine-coated pill to help ease the dissection of social class and no attempt. It is the film that the book deserves. Marvellous in other words.

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Film: 1965
Director: David Lean

The tumultuous years spanning World War 1 and the Russian Revolution are bought dynamically to life in Lean’s acclaimed adaptation of Pasternak’s work of genius. The complexity of the novel is vividly realised onscreen thanks to the marvellous cast that includes Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Alec Guinness, Tom Courtenay, Rod Steiger and Ralph Richardson.

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