Illustration by Geoff Kim.
Nimona
Nimona arrived on Netflix this summer and earned passionate support from its admirers. Praised for its queer themes and its unique visual identity, the animated film follows framed knight Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) and the shape-shifting Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz) on a quest to exonerate the former, earning the latter their rightful place as a hero. Screenwriters Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor (along with five credited story writers) lovingly adapt trans nonbinary author ND Stevenson’s visual style and uplifting queer story.
Robot Dreams
Robot Dreams debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival as a surprise heartbreaker. Brought to the screen by Spanish director and screenwriter Pablo Berger, the animated film follows a lonely Manhattanite dog who creates a robot for companionship, only to be devastated to lose him one day at the beach. Neon will be releasing this melancholy import later this year.
Dumb Money
Orange Is the New Black writers Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo fictionalize this telling of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze. With Paul Dano at the center as YouTube personality and financial analyst Keith Gill, the adaptation brings humor and outrage to its telling of fraught recent American history between the haves and have-nots. If this description is giving you flashes of The Social Network, no shocker there: It comes from author Ben Mezrich’s cheekily titled The Antisocial Network, a title riffing on David Fincher’s *The Social Network—*also adapted from a Mezrich book.
A Haunting in Venice
Retitled from the original Agatha Christie, this is the third of Kenneth Branagh’s films bringing the iconic detective Hercule Poirot to the screen. Once again working with the writer of the previous adaptations, Michael Green, A Haunting in Venice showcases Branagh’s ability to shift tones and genres in his screen iterations as smoothly as Christie did in her many mystery novels.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Adapted from the 2012 young adult novel of the same name by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, writer-director Aitch Alberto’s queer romance follows two titular Mexican American teenagers who connect one summer, only to find their understanding of their relationship challenged by a school year apart, leading to personal and familial revelations. After playing the festival circuit in the past year, the tender independent film had its theatrical release this summer.
The Bikeriders
Here is one of the year’s most unique book adaptations: writer-director Jeff Nichols brings the tale of an outcast band of motorcyclists with The Bikeriders. The film comes from the 1968 photo book by famous American photographer Danny Lyon, weaving together a narrative of masculinity and loyalty from Lyon’s arresting imagery. Though drawing rich inspiration from Lyon’s work, the film has nevertheless been confirmed to be campaigning for the best-original-screenplay nomination.
Eileen
Making her first foray into movies by writing a faithful (and therefore, quite twisted) adaptation of her own debut 2015 novel, Moshfegh works with cowriter Luke Goebel and director William Oldroyd to paint a brooding portrait of curdled small-town life. Thomasin McKenzie stars as the eponymous youth prison worker who becomes enamored by a newly arrived counselor (Anne Hathaway), a relationship with shocking consequences that already divided audiences during its Sundance Film Festival premiere.
Shortcomings
Adrian Tomine adapted his own graphic novel into this Sundance crowd-pleaser. With actor Randall Park making his directorial debut, the film comedically examines the romantic entanglements and racial politics among three Asian Americans living in the Bay Area. Sony Pictures Classics released the film in late summer.
Landscape With Invisible Hand
The Sundance-to-late-summer-release trajectory also delivered Cory Finley’s big-screen take on M.T. Anderson’s science fiction novel. A genre comedy about a future planet Earth inhabited by aliens and two teens who sell their romance to said aliens as entertainment, the film was released by MGM for a brief theatrical run this summer.
Foe
Blending elements of science fiction, horror, and relationship drama, Iain Reid’s novel Foe imagines a married couple on a remote farm; one day they receive a visit from a corporate representative who tells them that the husband will be temporarily shipped to a space station and replaced by artificial intelligence. Adapted into a film by Reid and director Garth Davis, the story is transformed into a twisty movie much like Reid’s previous book-to-screen brain bender, I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Knock at the Cabin
This winter release finds a family tied up by violent intruders in their home who claim they can prevent the apocalypse if one member of the family sacrifices themselves. M. Night Shyamalan took the film’s reins (along with co-screenwriters Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman) and made some significant adjustments to the film’s finale, with a slightly less bleak take on this high-stakes scenario.
Leave the World Behind
Catastrophe is also ahead in Leave the World Behind, Sam Esmail’s star-studded take on the popular National Book Award finalist and COVID-era success. A wooded Long Island home provides both refuge and tension for two families (led by Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali) as a blackout marks the first sign of apocalypse, surfacing their prejudices of race and class as they attempt to survive what is to come. The film hits limited theaters in November and drops on Netflix in December.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Another unconventional feat of adaptation, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (written by Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, and director David Goldhaber) is the story of a group of young adults attempting to, well, blow up a pipeline. The film is frank about both the logistical challenges and moral complexities of their mission, reconstructing the book’s ideas and arguments within a fictional thriller premise.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
This mouthful of a title brings us to Panem long before the arrival of the messianic Katniss, showing us the early days of Coriolanus Snow, the young man who would eventually become the evil president, during the 10th Hunger Games. Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie take on the adaptation duties, bringing Suzanne Collins’s 2020 prequel to audiences with hopefully none of its franchise glory diminished, even as it focuses on a darker character.
Red, White & Royal Blue
Readers were clamoring for a screen version of Casey McQuiston’s debut bestseller about an American president’s son and a British prince whose relationship goes from rivalry to romance. The film arrived on Amazon Prime in August and stayed at the top of the Prime charts for three weeks—who says the rom-com is dead!
Society of the Snow
J.A. Bayona (along with co-screenwriters Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, and Nicolás Casariego) uses Pablo Vierci’s book Society of the Snow: The Definitive Account of the World’s Greatest Survival Story to recount the Miracle of the Andes, the 1972 plane crash that stranded passengers in the Andes for 72 days. Viewers are likely familiar with this story from the Frank Marshall film Alive, but they can find this new, more modern iteration once the film arrives on Netflix and competes as Spain’s submission for the best-international-feature Oscar.
Pain Hustlers
Netflix has a different kind of true tale on deck with Pain Hustlers, an accounting of the myriad ethics violations by pharmaceutical companies that led to the opioid epidemic. The story is told through the eyes of a new pharmaceutical rep, played by Emily Blunt, as she enters the industry in the early 2000s. While the film takes a fictionalized approach to Evan Hughes’s nonfiction book, it still focuses on the real horrors inflicted by Big Pharma.
BlackBerry
Those Social Network vibes given off by Dumb Money are perhaps even stronger with BlackBerry, adapted by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller from the nonfiction book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry. But the film largely trades fact for comedic fiction when depicting the smartphone company’s trajectory, and it earned strong reviews earlier this year, particularly for star Glenn Howerton.
Flamin’ Hot
Richard Montañez’s 2013 memoir charted how he rose out of blue-collar work thanks to his creation of the spicy flavor that would end up being used for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, though his claim to the invention has since been refuted. However, screenwriters Linda Yvette Chávez and Lewis Colick expanded the narrative with further stories from the Montañez family for the film directed by Eva Longoria, which was released on Hulu earlier this year.
The End We Start From
Megan Hunter’s 2017 debut novel follows a UK mother as an ecological disaster strikes, forcing her to flee with her infant child as flooding overtakes their community. Jodie Comer headlines the film, while Succession’s Alice Birch takes on screenwriting duties, after previously adapting The Wonder, Lady Macbeth, and Normal People.
The Eight Mountains
This holdover from last year’s Cannes festival, where it won the Jury Prize, arrived on US screens this year. The Eight Mountains is an epic but intimate story of spirituality and male friendship, with two boyhood companions growing up and working together to build a mountainside home to honor one of their deceased fathers.
Brother
This Canadian import had a very limited release this summer but contains big feelings. Looking back to Toronto’s Scarborough neighborhood in the 1990s, Clement Virgo’s script tracks a younger brother’s memories of the tragedy that befell his older brother in a community suffering under the weight of economic insecurity and police brutality. It’s a faithful adaptation worth seeking out.
The Pope’s Exorcist
Yes, if you can believe it, that early-in-the-year release that plopped Russell Crowe on a Vespa to go chase demons was based on the writings of a real exorcist. Father Gabriele Amorth published both An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories, which gave the backbone to Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos’s script about an exorcist who uncovers a Vatican secret during the exorcism of a child.
Marlowe
Old-fashioned noir came to the screen this year thanks to Oscar winners William Monahan and Neil Jordan. Based on Irish author John Banville’s pseudonymously written novel, Marlowe casts Liam Neeson as the iconic private investigator originally created by Raymond Chandler, still investigating Los Angeles–area murders in this new story.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar…and more!
Wes Anderson took a unique approach in adapting Roald Dahl’s short story collection for adults, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. Anderson delivered four of these stories as individual short films on Netflix, starting with the most lengthy Henry Sugar installment and then delivering The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison in succession. But no one would blame you for consuming or considering them all as one delightful whole.
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