By the Book
53 Episodes
You’ve read—or at least meant to read—the book. Now see the movie. Just in time for the start of school, we’ve collected some of the all-time great page-to-screen adaptations, encompassing English 101 classics like “Great Expectations” and “Lord Of The Flies,” world-literature masterpieces like “War and Peace” and “Pather Panchali,” and more. While faithful transpositions abound, there are plenty of surprising spins on canonical titles, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Japan-set retelling of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” and John Huston’s hallucinatory take on Malcolm Lowry’s “unfilmable” “Under the Volcano.” Each is a distinguished work of art in its own right, as worthy of appreciation as its celebrated source.
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1:33:19Episode 1
Closely Watched Trains
Episode 1
Directed by Jiří Menzel • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Václav Neckář, Josef Somr, Vlastimil BrodskýAt a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds h...
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2:27:26Episode 2
WAR AND PEACE: Part 1
Episode 2
ANDREI BOLKONSKY
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1966 • Soviet UnionAt the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates o...
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1:38:01Episode 3
WAR AND PEACE: Part 2
Episode 3
NATASHA ROSTOVA
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1966 • Soviet UnionAt the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of...
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1:21:40Episode 4
WAR AND PEACE: Part 3
Episode 4
THE YEAR 1812
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1967 • Soviet UnionAt the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of t...
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1:36:37Episode 5
WAR AND PEACE: Part 4
Episode 5
PIERRE BEZUKHOV
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1967 • Soviet UnionAt the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of...
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1:39:02Episode 6
Memories of Underdevelopment
Episode 6
Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea • 1968 • Cuba
Starring Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Omar ValdésThis film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is the most renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. After his wife and family flee in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the bourgeois intellectual Serg...
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2:20:07Episode 7
Dodes’ka-den
Episode 7
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1970 • Japan
Starring Yoshitaka Zushi, Kin Sugai, Junzaburo BanBy turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa’s film follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Yet as desperate as their circumstances are, e...
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1:48:19Episode 8
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Episode 8
Directed by Peter Weir • 1975 • Australia
Starring Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Helen MorseThis sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lin...
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2:07:38Episode 9
The American Friend
Episode 9
Directed by Wim Wenders • 1977 • Germany
Starring Dennis Hopper, Bruno GanzWim Wenders pays loving homage to rough-and-tumble Hollywood film noir with THE AMERICAN FRIEND, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “Ripley’s Game.” Dennis Hopper oozes quirky menace as an amoral American a...
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1:49:41Episode 10
The Ascent
Episode 10
Directed by Larisa Shepitko • 1977 • Soviet Union
Starring Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergei YakovlevThe crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the ...
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1:32:09Episode 11
Watership Down
Episode 11
Directed by Martin Rosen • 1978 • United Kingdom
Starring John Hurt, Richard Briers, Michael Graham-CoxWith this passion project, screenwriter-producer-director Martin Rosen brilliantly achieved what had been thought nearly impossible: a faithful big-screen adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic...
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1:45:21Episode 12
Empire of Passion
Episode 12
Directed by Nagisa Oshima • 1978 • Japan
Starring Tatsuya Fuji, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Takahiro TamuraWith an arresting mix of eroticism and horror, Oshima plunges the viewer into a nightmarish tale of guilt and retribution in EMPIRE OF PASSION (AI NO BOREI). Set in a Japanese village at the end of ...
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Stalker
Episode 13
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1979 • Soviet Union
Starring Alisa Freindlikh, Aleksandr Kaidnovsky, Anatoly SolonitsynAndrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired gui...
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2:43:30Episode 14
The Tin Drum
Episode 14
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff • 1979 • Germany
Starring David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela WinklerOskar is born in Germany in 1924 with an advanced intellect. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of adults and the irresponsibility of society, he refuses to grow older after his third birthday. While the c...
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1:40:15Episode 15
My Brilliant Career
Episode 15
Directed by Gillian Armstrong • 1979 • Australia
Starring Judy Davis, Sam NeillFor her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin’s novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-age story, to brashly upend the co...
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1:46:00Episode 16
Wise Blood
Episode 16
Directed by John Huston • 1979 • United States
Starring Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean StantonIn this acclaimed adaptation of the first novel by legendary Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, John Huston vividly brings to life her poetic world of American eccentricity. Brad Dourif, in an imp...
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49:07Episode 17
You Are Not I
Episode 17
Directed by Sara Driver • 1981 • United States
Starring Suzanne Fletcher, Melody Schneider, Bea BoyleA legendary, once-lost landmark of American underground cinema, Sara Driver’s first film was rediscovered in 2008 and has since taken its place as one of the key works of the No Wave filmmaking ...
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1:52:24Episode 18
Under the Volcano
Episode 18
Directed by John Huston • 1984 • Mexico, United States
Starring Albert Finney, Jacqueline BissetUNDER THE VOLCANO follows the final day in the life of self-destructive British consul Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney, in an Oscar-nominated tour de force) on the eve of World War II. Withering from ...
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2:01:31Episode 19
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Episode 19
Directed by Paul Schrader • 1985 • Japan, United States
Paul Schrader's visually stunning, collagelike portrait of acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima (played by Ken Ogata) investigates the inner turmoil and contradictions of a man who attempted an impossible harmony between s...
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1:41:38Episode 20
My Life as a Dog
Episode 20
Directed by Lasse Hallström • 1985 • Sweden
Starring Anton Glanzelius, Tomas von Brömssen, Anki LidenMY LIFE AS A DOG (MITT LIV SOM HUND) tells the story of Ingemar, a twelve-year-old from a working-class family sent to live with his uncle in a country village when his mother falls ill. There, ...
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3:05:15Episode 21
Betty Blue
Episode 21
Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix • 1986 • France
Starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Béatrice Dalle, Gérard DarmonWhen the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a sunbaked French beach town, it’s the ...
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1:52:22Episode 22
Europa Europa
Episode 22
Directed by Agnieszka Holland • 1990 • Germany, France, Poland
Starring Marco Hofschneider, Julie DelpyAs World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon (Marco Hofschneider) is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming v...
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1:44:50Episode 23
The Comfort of Strangers
Episode 23
Directed by Paul Schrader • 1990 • United States
Starring Christopher Walken, Rupert Everett, Natasha RichardsonTwo couples are drawn into a dark psychosexual vortex in Paul Schrader’s stylish take on the erotic thriller. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are a British couple hoping to repa...
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2:38:19Episode 24
An Angel at My Table
Episode 24
Directed by Jane Campion • 1990 • New Zealand
Starring Kerry Fox, Alexia Keogh, Karen FergussonWith AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Jane Campion brought to the screen the harrowing autobiography of Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most distinguished author. Three actors in turn ...