[Prestidigitweeze]

The Shining (in every possible way)

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (formally)

The Third Man could be better in some ways than the Graham Greene novel, but, like most adaptations, it's really an entirely different object.

Huston's Maltese Falcon is brilliant, but it's seen through a far more distorted lens than the book and approaches sardonic noir expressionism, whereas, for me, Hammett's angular visual prose has more in common with the modernist portraits of Wyndham Lewis.

Have to disagree on Bladerunner: The film is good, but in a completely different way from Do Androids Dream. It's more like an adaptation of Neuromancer. Besides which, at his worst, P.K. Dick is on a different level conceptually than that film. You can't really make a film out of Dick and get the texture (though Through a Scanner Darkly comes close).

Truthfully, I'd feel more comfortable contributing to a thread about films which were as or almost as good as the books but in completely different ways, making the relationship between film and literature complimentary but almost never equivalent.

Jan Kolski's adaptation of the Gombrowicz novel Pornografia falls into this category. It misses the amoral tone entirely, and isn't as great a work of art, but captures Gombrowicz's texture of paranoid coincidence and synesthesia like no other film I've seen.