Classic literature on screen: 21 great adaptations

Weekly collection in the app for the week of May 8, 2026.

When the source is the canon itself, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Dumas, Shelley, the question stops being whether the film is faithful and becomes whose reading burns brightest on screen. This collection gathers 21 answers, from David Lean's Dickens to Kubrick's Thackeray.

It ran as the weekly theme in the I Like Movies Discover tab for the week of May 8, 2026, featuring Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice. The list deliberately mixes eras: a 1939 Wuthering Heights sits next to del Toro's 2025 Frankenstein.

The collection

1. Pride & Prejudice (2005) Joe Wright Featured Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy misjudge each other across muddy fields and candlelit halls; Joe Wright's dawn-lit, hand-flexing version made Austen swoon-worthy for a new generation. Cast: Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Brenda Blethyn
2. Sense and Sensibility (1995) Lee Two sisters, one all prudence and one all passion, navigate reduced circumstances and unreliable suitors; Emma Thompson won an Oscar for the script and should have for the performance. Cast: Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman
3. Anna Karenina (2012) Joe Wright Tolstoy's doomed affair staged almost entirely inside a decaying theatre, society as literal performance; a divisive, gorgeous gamble with Knightley at its center. Cast: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
4. Wuthering Heights (1939) Wyler Heathcliff and Cathy's destructive bond on the Yorkshire moors, in the Hollywood-gothic version with Laurence Olivier; it trims the novel's second half and burnishes the doom. Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, David Niven
5. Jane Eyre (2011) Fukunaga A governess with an iron sense of self falls for her brooding employer, whose house holds a secret; Fukunaga's version restores the gothic chill with Wasikowska and Fassbender. Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell
6. Great Expectations (1946) Lean An orphan raised by a blacksmith is made a gentleman by a mystery benefactor, and misreads everything; David Lean's version, from the marsh opening onward, remains the definitive Dickens on film. Cast: John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Tony Wager
7. Oliver Twist (1948) Lean The workhouse orphan who asked for more falls in with Fagin's pickpockets in Lean's shadow-drenched London; controversial then for Guinness's Fagin, unmatched since for atmosphere. Cast: John Howard Davies, Robert Newton, Alec Guinness
8. The Three Musketeers (1973) Lester D'Artagnan joins the king's musketeers amid diamond intrigues; Lester's version plays the swashbuckling as rowdy slapstick with real swords, and the cast is absurdly deep. Cast: Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain
9. The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) Reynolds Betrayed into an island prison, Edmond Dantès escapes, finds a fortune and re-enters society as an instrument of patient revenge; the sturdy modern version of the ultimate payback novel. Cast: Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce, Richard Harris
10. Frankenstein (2025) del Toro Del Toro's lifelong dream project: Victor Frankenstein and his creature locked in a gothic tragedy of fathers and abandonment, mourning where others put lightning bolts. Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz
11. Lady Macbeth (2016) Oldroyd Sold into marriage to a cold Northern industrialist, a young woman takes a lover and then removes, one by one, everything in her way; Leskov's novella stripped to the bone, with Florence Pugh's breakout. Cast: Florence Pugh, Cosmo Jarvis, Paul Hilton
12. The Trial (1962) Welles Josef K. wakes under arrest for a crime no one will name, and the process swallows him; Welles built Kafka's nightmare in a derelict Paris railway station and called it his best film. Cast: Anthony Perkins, Romy Schneider, Orson Welles
13. A Room with a View (1985) Ivory A proper English girl kissed in a Florentine barley field must choose between passion and a fiancé made entirely of opinions; Merchant Ivory's sunniest film. Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Julian Sands, Maggie Smith
14. Howards End (1992) Ivory The idealist Schlegel sisters entangle with the wealthy, careless Wilcoxes over a house that stands for England itself; Forster's social web given full Merchant Ivory weight. Cast: Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins
15. The Age of Innocence (1993) Scorsese A New York lawyer engaged to a perfect bride falls for her scandalous cousin, and Gilded Age society closes around them without one raised voice; Scorsese called it his most violent film. Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder
16. Tess (1979) Polanski A poor girl sent to claim kinship with a rich family is ruined by one man and failed by the better one she loves; Hardy's tragedy filmed by Polanski with terrible patience. Cast: Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson
17. White Nights (1957) Visconti A lonely clerk meets a woman on a canal bridge who is waiting for a lover who promised to return; Visconti stages Dostoevsky's four nights on dreamlike studio sets swirling with fog. Cast: Maria Schell, Marcello Mastroianni, Jean Marais
18. Madame Bovary (1991) Chabrol A doctor's wife in provincial Normandy chases the passion novels promised her through affairs and debt; Chabrol observes Flaubert's heroine with cool exactness, Huppert in the lead. Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-François Balmer, Christophe Malavoy
19. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956) Delannoy The deaf bell-ringer of Notre Dame, the street dancer Esmeralda, and the archdeacon whose desire destroys them all; the French version with Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida. Cast: Gina Lollobrigida, Anthony Quinn, Alain Cuny
20. Barry Lyndon (1975) Kubrick An Irish chancer duels, deserts and marries his way into the English aristocracy, then loses it all; Kubrick shot Thackeray's novel like moving paintings, by candlelight. Cast: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee
21. Hamlet (1996) Branagh Branagh films the complete, uncut text in 70mm, a four-hour Hamlet in a bright mirrored Elsinore with an all-star cast down to the smallest role; the maximal version. Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Kate Winslet

Keep your place

Read the book, watchlist the film, or the other way round: I Like Movies keeps the screen half of the pairing tracked and rated. New themed collections arrive in the Discover tab every Friday.

Questions people ask

What is the best Jane Austen film adaptation?

Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Sense and Sensibility (1995) lead most polls, and both are here. Wright's film is the more cinematic reading; Lee's, written by Emma Thompson, has the sharper script.

Do these films follow the books?

Loosely to freely. Welles moved The Trial into nightmare architecture, Visconti's White Nights repaints Dostoevsky in studio fog, and Lady Macbeth strips its Leskov novella to the bone. Fidelity is not the point; interpretation is.

The week before: Workers' cinema: 21 films about labor and dignity. The week after: Y2K romcoms: 21 films from the genre's last golden age. See every weekly theme, or browse every guide, watch order and comparison.