Great Adaptations
Spanning three decades of international art-house, this lineup favors bold cinematic ambition over literal translation. Rather than playing it safe, these films treat literary texts as launching pads for radical visual experiments. Nietzchka Keene’s "The Juniper Tree" and Derek Jarman’s "Edward II" crack open folkloric and classical sources with stark, avant-garde flair, while Cate Shortland’s "Lore" captures post-war survival through a raw, sensory lens. Sprawling, existential literary works find hypnotic equivalents in Raul Ruiz’s "Time Regained" and "Mysteries of Lisbon", and Lucrecia Martel’s "Zama". These wide ranging masterpieces show that true auteurs don't just adapt literature—they also reimagine and reinvent it.
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Edward II
Directed by Derek Jarman | 90 mins | 1991
Jarman’s lusciously Brechtian adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play, its regal production design furnished by his biggest budget yet, leans all the way into the queer subtext of its source material. Tilda Swinton radiates as Queen Isabella, resentful... -
Time Regained
Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 162 mins | 1999
“The best way to adapt something for film is to dream it,” quipped Raúl Ruiz. This apparently facetious remark nevertheless captures something of the feeling of the Chilean master’s lauded adaptation of Proust’s seven-volume opus, "In Search of Lost Time" ... -
Mysteries of Lisbon
Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 267 mins | 2010
It is a rare thing for one of a filmmaker’s final works to rank among their greatest, and their most classically sumptuous—but such is the case with Ruiz’s sweeping, four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s novel of... -
Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything
Directed by Emily Atef | 129 mins | 2023
The golden hot summer after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provides the backdrop for Emily Atef’s fraught and steamy May-December romance, adapted from a 2011 novel by Daniela Krien. On a farm in former East Germany, 19-year-old Maria drifts apart fro... -
The Juniper Tree
Directed by Nietzchka Keene | 78 mins | 1990
A young Björk makes her captivating screen debut in this stark, windswept fable, freely adapted from a Brothers Grimm story, about two sisters, one endowed with witchy gifts, who set out in search of a new home after their mother is murdered. Setting ... -
Zama
Directed by Lucrecia Martel | 115 mins | 2017
A scruffy bureaucrat for the Spanish crown hopelessly angles for ways to get ahead in this audacious vision of 18th-century colonial empire, adapted from Antonio de Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name. Don Diego’s anti-epic progress in a far-flung... -
Lore
Leaving August 1
Directed by Cate Shortland | 109 mins | 2012
Cate Shortland followed her moody and startling feature debut, "Somersault" (2004), with another bruising story of a teen girl expelled from home—in this case, by history in the making. Abandoned by her high-level Nazi parents in the ... -
Only the River Flows
Directed by Wei Shujun | 102 mins | 2023
After a woman’s body is discovered on a river bank in rural southern China, police investigator Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) finds that it’s only the first layer of a deepening mystery, bound up in the hidden life of the nearby community. Based on Yu Hua’s short n... -
Tony Takitani
Directed by Jun Ichikawa | 76 mins | 2004
Jun Ichikawa is one of Japan’s least-appraised geniuses, and "Tony Takitani" is perhaps his masterpiece. This Haruki Murakami adaptation mirrors the author’s clear, precise prose with its study of a well-meaning loner, played perfectly by Issey Ogata ("Yi... -
Sworn Virgin
Directed by Laura Bispuri | 88 mins | 2015
This adaptation of Elvira Dones’s acclaimed novel fully mines the psychological dimensions of the “sworn virgin”—Albanian women who follow an obscure law whereby, upon taking a vow of virginity, they may escape imposed domestic life and live as a man. Ma...
