Great Adaptations

I usually don’t have very great expectations when it comes to films adapted from classic novels but over the years some adaptations have stood out, either because of their uncompromising faithfulness to a classic novel or for their wonderful re-imagining of such a novel.

Sergei Bondarchuk’s sumptuous retelling of Tolstoy’s War and Peace just may be the best screen adaptation of all time. Not only did he capture the narrative flow of the novel, but many of its more subtle passages, as Pierre Bezukhov...