Critics reviews

But this discursive, unpredictable comedy is more than smoke and mirrors. It's truly astute about a certain diffidence which afflicts the intellectual elite (beautifully caught by Streep as Susan Orlean), about the self-consuming nature of obsession, and about orchids, come to that. For two-thirds of its running time the film is close to genius. But there's still no third act.

But the title is a pun, referring both to Darwinian principle of adaptation and the ordeal of adapting a book into a screenplay. Although its soul is comic, and it indulges in shameless invention, it is also the most accurate film I have seen about this process - exaggerated, yes, but true.

Perhaps Adaptation wantonly mystifies the writer's work, making Charlie Kaufman's task look more wretchedly impossible than it actually is. He did, after all, do a straight job of adapting Chuck Barris's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. But it's a funny, complex take on the idea of storytelling, the tyranny of three-act narrative and how the movies absorb literary properties.

Hollywood movies don't come more subversive, inventive and daring than this hilarious comedy from the creative team behind "Being John Malkovich".

Few scripts toss more challenging balls in the air, and Jonze juggles them all with artful, light-stepping ease. It’s magic.

In the end, for all its manic comedy and its "profound life lessons," "Adaptation" is a fundamentally sad work. As Charlie Kaufman says of "The Orchid Thief," it's a story about disappointment. Kaufman sets himself a challenge -- making a movie without "character arcs" and artificial transformations -- that he can't meet... So "Adaptation" is a highly enjoyable failure, a quandary that can't resolve itself.

Yes, ''Adaptation'' is, most obviously, a movie about itself, as gleefully self-referential an exercise in auto-deconstruction as you could wish. But it is also, more deeply, a movie about its own nonexistence -- a narrative that confronts both the impossibility and the desperate necessity of storytelling, and that short-circuits our expectations of coherence, plausibility and fidelity to lived reality even as it satisfies them.

“Adaptation” shows one masterful touch after another. While Jonze never compromises the humor of Kaufman’s script, he finds a deeper, more resonant nerve in all these stories... “Adaptation” is one of the most fearless, most accomplished films in years.

Difficult to describe in a few hundred words, Adaptation is an essential cinematic experience - witty, bold, endlessly clever and ultimately profound. It questions the very structure of film itself and operates on several different levels, each individually effective.

The film is cripplingly funny and in many ways more audacious than Being John Malkovich, even if Jonze and Kaufman’s talents are less seamlessly integrated this time around.

However much Kaufman may have embellished the truth about his own personality, there's no denying the fact that his self-deprecating self-portrait is superb. What's more, he taps into the nuances of the tortured artist - from writer's block and insomnia, to the sheer frustration of having one's train of thought interrupted - with razor-sharp accuracy.