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When it comes to movie adaptations, this year was such an embarrassment of riches that making a top-ten list of best adaptations proved a tough task – if also a fun one. (No one’s ever going to pity a film critic for having to revisit movies she loves.) Of course, every top-ten list is sure to enrage as many people as it pleases, so read on and then tell me: What would be on your list of best 2015 adaptations? Here’s what I have on mine.

10) “45 Years”
Amid all the “Exotic Marigold Hotel”-style films about the Endearing Habits of Elders comes this shadowy and formidably honest portrait of an aging couple who discover they may not know each other as well as they’d thought. Sixties icons Tom Courtenay and Charlotte “The Look” Rampling star in this deft adaptation by screenwriter/director Andrew Haigh (“Weekend,” “Looking”) of David Constantine’s short story “In Another Country.” A final scene comprises the best minute of acting in 2015 cinema.

9) “Carol”
Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s groundbreaking 1952 novel, director Todd Haynes’s latest film is easily the most hopeful love story of the year. Cate Blanchett stars as a married socialite with red lipstick to match her talons; all kewpie doll eyes and tiny pouts, Rooney Mara plays the shopgirl with whom she has an affair. Though this at times devolves into a Douglas Sirk museum, it also is a stunningly rendered paean to the courage that intimacy universally requires.

8) “The End of the Tour”
Though it may prove less satisfying to ardent fans of the late author David Foster Wallace, this adaptation of David Lipsky’s book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, about a five-day interview he conducted with the Infinite Jest author, offers flashes of insight that far outstrip its source material. Starring Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky in a feat of casting that’s almost too on the nose, it it is directed by James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” “Smashed”), who excels at exposing self-delusions with the gentlest of bedside manners. Continue Reading →

This summer, it was announced that “Wool,” a dystopia about an underground city on an otherwise-uninhabitable Earth, was finally under way three years after Twentieth Century Fox nabbed the rights to Hugh Howey’s eponymous book. The project now comes with stellar credentials: “Guardians of the Galaxy” screenwriter Nicole Perman is rewriting “The Fifth Wave” director J Blakeson’s original script, and Steven Zaillian (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Moneyball”) and Ridley Scott (“Alien,” “Blade Runner”) are producing. Not bad for a book that got its start as a series of self-published novellas. But that’s the thing about all self-published book adaptations. No matter how they fare at the box office or on Rotten Tomatoes, they qualify as cinema’s Little Engines That Could. The sheer fact that these stories have defeated so many odds – that they made it to the big screen at all given that they initially could not find a niche in the literary world – is amazing. And some of the films in this category may surprise you. Continue Reading →