Adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from the novel by Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps it is shortsighted to crown No Country For Old Men as the best film adaptation of all time a mere two years after its release. However, the fact is, with their stellar script and equally spectacular direction, Joel and Ethan Coen elevated McCarthy's already taut morality thriller into something electric. The film is especially notable for how closely it adheres to its source material, and while remaining faithful to the book doesn't in and of itself make a good adaptation, No Country For Old Men is, quite simply, the most perfect realization of an author's world from page to screen. Even more importantly, it is its own separate piece of cinematic art.

Adapted by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben from the novel by Ken Kesey

Heralded as both a classic film and a classic work of American literature, this is the first of two films on this list to win all of the "big five" Academy Awards (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay), and Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest positively nails the drab, oppressive atmosphere of its preceding novel. Kesey has expressed distaste for the film because, in writing the screenplay, Goldman and Hauben chose to deemphasize the novel's subtly unreliable narrator. For a medium like film, we think that was the correct decision.

Adapted by Charlie Kaufman from the non-fiction book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

Kaufman's script for Adaptation flies in the face of all the conventional wisdom surrounding adapting literature to film. When given the opportunity to write a script based on Orlean's thrilling and contemplative look at the orchid black-market in the American south, Kaufman instead wrote himself and his own struggles with the script into some bizarrely wonderful metatheatrical parable about art, aging, and the thirst for success.

Adapted by Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Towne from Puzo's novel

THE American crime classic, it is almost impossible to overstate the cultural significance of this film. Seeing as it was adapted from a pulp novel, and the reigns were given to an inexperienced, novice director, The Godfather should have been unremarkable in every way. Instead, Coppola created what can only be described as an epic, and established himself as one of the premiere auteurs of the seventies.

Adapted by Dashiell Hammett, Albert Hackett, and Frances Goodrich from Hammett's novel

A masterful adaptation of what was by all accounts a pretty by-the-numbers murder mystery, The Thin Man was so wildly successful (both critically and financially) that it spawned six sequels (the best of which is 1936's After The Thin Man). The films succeed where the novel failed by realizing that the strength of the story stems from the charmingly witty relationship between Nick and Nora, not from the mysteries that they solve with almost laughable ease.

Adapted by Ted Tally from the novel by Thomas Harris

Yet another case of a mediocre novel being transformed into something spectacular, Jonathan Demme's modern horror classic is an unparalleled genre straddler existing somewhere between drama, cop procedural, and thriller. But for all of those grandiose notions, the heart of the film lies in the smaller moments of Clarice's growth as a character and in the relationship between Clarice and Hannibal Lecter.

Adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson from the novel by Stephen King

Kubrick's true power was his mastery of the wide shot, and his vision of King's The Shining is no exception. The creepy old Overlook Hotel was not the dark, claustrophobic mess we'd come to expect from the novel, but instead became an imposingly bright and open expanse. King has notably distanced himself from Kubrick's work due to major differences in theme. But what makes this a spectacular adaptation is that it allows the viewer to experience the story anew from the perspective of an artist working with a wholly different palate.

Adapted by Josh Olson from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke

David Cronenberg is a sort of dime-store novel recidivist, returning time and time again to less than stellar source material in order to craft his stunningly unique films. In fact, any number of Cronenberg films could have made this list - from Dead Ringers to Crash to The Fly to Naked Lunch - but what sets A History of Violence apart is how particularly dreadful the original novel was compared to how spectacular Cronenberg's resulting film is.

Adapted by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Stephen Sinclair from the novels by J.R.R. Tolkien

While technically not a single adaptation, The Lord of the Rings films were the marquee film event of the past decade and unquestionably brought Middle Earth to life. While no film adaptation of Tolkien's work could ever fully please his rabid fanbase, Peter Jackson did a fantastic job at the helm, making sure all three films (shot concurrently) maintained the heart and soul of the novels.

Adapted by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola from the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Coppola supplanted war for industry and set his adaptation of Conrad's masterpiece a couple of centuries later and in a different country thousands of miles away. Nonetheless, this adaptation, thanks in no small part to Coppola and Milius' relentlessly bleak script and a masterful performance by Martin Sheen, gets right to the heart of its source novel: Man is a dark, evil thing. If war is indeed hell, then Coppola did an amazing job documenting it in this surrealist, nightmarish epic.

Adapted by Horton Foote from the novel by Harper Lee

Turning the written word into a film is, in and of itself, no small feat, but to turn one of the most beloved pieces of American fiction into one of the most beloved American films is practically unthinkable. That is, unless you're talking about To Kill A Mockingbird. At the same time, starting with a story as well formed and exhilarating as the one found in Lee's novel is something any screenwriter would be envious of; luckily, director Robert Mulligan knew when to stand back and let the story, with Gregory Peck at the helm, tell itself.

Adapted by Fridrikh Gorenshtein and Andrei Tarkovsky from the novel by Stanislaw Lem

Much like his contemporary Kubrick, Tarkovsky opted to use his source material (in this case the Polish novel Solaris) as a slight sketch upon which to paint, and the result is a masterful, contemplative meditation on grief and loss. If you've only ever seen Soderbergh's middling remake, do yourself a favor and rent the Criterion DVD of Tarkovsky's masterpiece.

Adapted by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers from the children's book by Maurice Sendak

The culmination of nearly thirty years of attempted adaptation, Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are is an amazing artistic achievement, at once completely separate from and wholly in step with the Maurice Sendak picture book that spawned it. And that's not to mention the presumably arduous task of writing a full-length screenplay based on a book with only eighteen lines of text. For that, Jonze teamed with Eggers, author of the acclaimed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.