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Road to Perdition (2002)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner's comic is a pulpy gangland revenge story. Sam Mendes kept its spine, a mob enforcer on the run with his young son, and dropped the pulp action for something somber and close to operatic.
Tom Hanks plays the hitman against type, Paul Newman is the boss he has always treated as a father, and Jude Law turns up as a very unsettling rival. It is the best case for showing a skeptic that a crime comic can carry a grown-up prestige drama without losing its gangster bones.
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A History of Violence (2005)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
Few viewers realize this began as a 1997 Paradox Press graphic novel by Judge Dredd creator John Wagner and artist Vince Locke. David Cronenberg follows the book closely while a diner owner's act of self-defense makes him a local hero and draws gangsters to his door.
The second half is where the two part company. Cronenberg turns William Hurt's Richie into Tom's own brother and gives a key killing to the son rather than the wife, which shifts the whole film toward a family's doubt about the man at its center. Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello make that doubt the real thriller. Read the book afterward and compare.
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Sin City (2005)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
If you want to see a comic's actual look on screen, start here. Robert Rodriguez's take on Frank Miller's hardboiled noir is remarkably faithful, using stark black-and-white photography and heavy prosthetics to turn Miller's grotesque goons and tough dames into living ink.
It works as an anthology, with Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen and Bruce Willis each carrying a strand, so it rewards dipping in as much as a single sitting. The trade-off is that it copies the books' brutality and their leering view of women too, so this is one for readers who already like Miller's pulp.
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Oldboy (2003)
8.3/10on IMDb
Released
The 2003 Korean film, not the 2013 American remake. Park Chan-wook took a Japanese manga by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi, kept its brilliant hook of a businessman locked in an ordinary room for fifteen years without being told why, and built something far more operatic and cruel around it.
Choi Min-sik is ferocious as the man let out to find his jailer, and the film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004. It is the strongest argument on this list that an adaptation can outgrow its source. Be warned that the violence and the final revelation are hard to shake.
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From Hell (2001)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's Jack the Ripper epic is one of the most ambitious books the medium has produced, serialized over years before it finished in 1996 and an Eisner winner along the way. The Hughes brothers could never fit all of it into two hours, so they made a gaslit Victorian thriller instead.
Johnny Depp plays Abberline as an opium-using inspector who falls for one of the Ripper's targets, and the film never matched the book's acclaim. Taken as a handsome, grim period mystery it holds up, and it is an easy route into one of the great graphic novels for anyone who has not yet read it.
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Lady Snowblood (1973)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Kill Bill fans owe this one a look. Kazuo Koike wrote the manga and Kazuo Kamimura drew it, a revenge saga about a young woman trained from birth to destroy the swindlers who ruined her family, set by Koike in the late 19th-century Meiji era.
Toshiya Fujita's film tells it in chapters, the episodic shape Tarantino later borrowed openly, and Meiko Kaji carries it almost entirely with her eyes. Kaji asked for much of the manga's crude dialogue to be cut, which leaves a leaner, colder film of snow, umbrellas and arterial spray.
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American Splendor (2003)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
The cleverest answer anyone has found to adapting autobiographical comics. Harvey Pekar wrote about his ordinary Cleveland life and had other artists draw it, so Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who had previously made only documentaries, mix Paul Giamatti's performance as Pekar with interviews with the real man and animated sections drawn by the likes of R. Crumb.
Hope Davis is terrific as his partner Joyce Brabner. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2003, and the way it keeps cutting between actor, cartoon and the genuine article is the closest a film has come to the feel of flipping through an anthology comic.
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Persepolis (2007)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Marjane Satrapi adapted her own autobiographical graphic novels about growing up through the Iranian Revolution, co-directing with comics artist Vincent Paronnaud, and that is why it feels so true to the page. The film keeps the bold, mostly black-and-white look of her drawings, so faces and crowds read like her panels set in motion.
It shared the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007, and Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve lead the French voice cast. Funny, angry and moving by turns, it is the one to hand to anyone who still thinks animation and comics are only for children.
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The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
Phoebe Gloeckner's 2002 book mixes diary prose with drawings, and Marielle Heller's film finds a lovely equivalent: animated inserts spring out of the frame to show what 15-year-old Minnie, an aspiring comic artist in 1970s San Francisco, is feeling in the moment.
Bel Powley is extraordinary in the lead, and Heller refuses to judge her. That frankness is also the caveat. Minnie's affair with her mother's boyfriend is at the heart of the story, so this is a sharp, uncomfortable coming-of-age film for adults rather than a gentle teen comedy.
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My Friend Dahmer (2017)
6.2/10on IMDb
Released
True crime told from the school hallway. Cartoonist John "Derf" Backderf knew Jeffrey Dahmer as a teenager and began his autobiographical comic about those years in 1994, after Dahmer was murdered in prison.
Marc Myers's film keeps the book's unsettling angle: the killings lie in the future, and what you watch is a lonely, strange boy and the classmates who half noticed. Ross Lynch is genuinely disturbing as Dahmer, with Alex Wolff as Derf. Pick it if you want the psychology of a case without the gore that usually comes with it.
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Ghost World (2001)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
The film that proved alternative comics could make great cinema. Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes turned Clowes's comic about two sardonic recent high school graduates, played by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, into a deadpan portrait of drifting through the summer after high school.
The big change is Seymour, the lonely middle-aged record collector Steve Buscemi plays so beautifully. Zwigoff created him partly to get the music he wanted into the film, and he gives Enid an adult mirror of where her own restlessness might lead. The screenplay earned an Oscar nomination, and the film keeps Clowes's bleak, funny eye for suburban nowhere.
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Tamara Drewe (2010)
6.2/10on IMDb
Released
Proof that a comic adaptation can be a very English village comedy. Posy Simmonds's strip is a modern retelling of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, and Stephen Frears keeps its gossipy rural village of Ewedown, where a novelist runs his farmhouse as a retreat for other writers.
Gemma Arterton plays the returning journalist who sets every man in the place off balance, and she is very good at the comedy. Frears plays it broader and sunnier than Simmonds's sharper, darker book, so treat it as a light, witty watch and read the original for the bite.
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Our Little Sister (2015)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
For anyone who thinks manga means robots and ninjas. Hirokazu Kore-eda adapted Akimi Yoshida's best-selling Umimachi Diary, about three sisters in a big old house in the seaside town of Kamakura who invite their teenage half-sister to live with them after their estranged father dies.
Nothing explosive happens, and that is the point. Kore-eda keeps the story's patient rhythm of shared meals and small resentments, and the four women feel like a real family by the end. It is the gentlest film on this list and the one to pick on a quiet Sunday.
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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
The romantic comedy as a video game, which is exactly how Bryan Lee O'Malley built the books. He wanted levels and bosses, so Scott, a slacker bassist, has to defeat Ramona Flowers's seven evil exes to date her, and Edgar Wright puts the comic's on-screen lettering, sound effects and fight logic straight into the film.
Wright signed on in 2005, and filming began in 2009, before O'Malley had published the sixth and final volume, so the film was shaped before the story was complete on the page. Few adaptations capture a comic's visual grammar this thoroughly.
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In This Corner of the World (2016)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
The war film for people who do not usually watch war films. Fumiyo Kono's manga, which ran from 2007 to 2009, follows Suzu, a dreamy, inventive young woman who leaves her home in Hiroshima to marry into a family in nearby Kure, the Imperial Navy's largest port.
Sunao Katabuchi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Chie Uratani, keeps the manga's gentle drawn look and its focus on household chores and making do with less, which makes the war's arrival in 1944 and 1945 land all the harder. Knowing where Hiroshima sits on the map gives the whole film a quiet dread.
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The Death of Stalin (2017)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
Most viewers have no idea Armando Iannucci's black comedy started as a French bande dessinée. Fabien Nury wrote it and Thierry Robin drew it, a two-volume account of the panic and plotting among Stalin's inner circle as he lies dying, which Titan later published in English.
Iannucci swaps the book's grim satire for the rapid, foul-mouthed farce of The Thick of It, with Moscow's most powerful men bickering over a body on the floor. It is the funniest film here and, under the jokes, one of the most chilling. If you enjoy it, the graphic novel shows how little the historical absurdity needed exaggerating.
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300 (2007)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
The 2007 Zack Snyder film of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's graphic novel about the Spartans at Thermopylae, and the most literal page-to-screen transfer here. Shot on blue screens with every environment added digitally, it copies the look of the book's artwork frame by frame, and Snyder reckoned it was about 90 percent the book.
His main addition is a storyline for the Spartan queen at home, to remind you what the fight is for. Treat it as myth rather than history, with a lurid streak in how it pictures the Persians, but nothing else captures how a splash page feels quite like it.
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Snowpiercer (2013)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
A French comic album became a Korean director's English-language action film, and it works because the premise is so strong. Le Transperceneige, by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette, imagines the last survivors of a frozen Earth circling the globe on one endless train, rich at the front and poor at the back.
Bong Joon-ho turns that into a car-by-car rebellion, each car a new world, with Chris Evans leading the uprising and Tilda Swinton gloriously grotesque as a front-of-train official. Song Kang-ho steals scenes. A sharp pick for anyone who likes their science fiction angry about class.
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Atomic Blonde (2017)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
A Cold War spy story with a stuntman's eye. David Leitch, an uncredited co-director of John Wick, took the bare bones of the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City, an MI6 agent sent into Berlin to find a missing list of double agents, and built a much bigger, louder action film on them.
Charlize Theron's Lorraine Broughton is the reason to watch: cool, battered and utterly convincing in long, punishing fight scenes. Readers who loved the book's spycraft may miss its slower intrigue, but if you want comic-derived action with no capes at all, few films hit harder.
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Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
Gadgets, tailoring and no costumes. Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons's 2012 comic The Secret Service is a gleefully nasty riff on British spy films, and Matthew Vaughn's film keeps that wicked streak while winking hard at Bond.
Taron Egerton is convincing as Eggsy, the street kid recruited into a secret agency, and Colin Firth is a joy as the impeccably mannered agent who suddenly lets loose. The violence is cartoonish and very much for adults. Choose it when you want a comic adaptation that is pure, cheeky entertainment.
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Men in Black (1997)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
The 1997 original, and the blockbuster most people never realize came from a comic. Lowell Cunningham and Sandy Carruthers's The Men in Black first appeared in 1990 from the small publisher Aircel, a darker series that later passed to Marvel.
The film toned down the comic's violence and dropped its wider paranormal side to focus on aliens, which turned a cult oddity into a buddy comedy about a New York cop recruited into a secret agency that polices aliens on Earth. A good one to win over friends who swear they do not like comic films.
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Akira (1988)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
The rare case of a cartoonist directing his own adaptation. Katsuhiro Otomo co-wrote and directed this film of his manga while the comic was still running, so the film compresses a sprawling story and reaches an ending of its own.
What it keeps is Otomo's Neo-Tokyo, a city rebuilding after being destroyed in a third world war, drawn with a density of detail that still looks astonishing. The biker gang and the military experiment that turns one rider into a psychic menace are teenage rage rather than heroics. Watch it on the biggest screen you can, then read the manga for everything it left out.
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Ghost in the Shell (1995)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
The 1995 animated film by Mamoru Oshii, not the 2017 live-action remake. Masamune Shirow's 1989 manga follows Major Motoko Kusanagi, a public security officer in a cybernetic body, and Oshii slows it into a brooding hunt for a hacker called the Puppet Master that keeps asking what is left of a person once most of them is machine.
It runs a lean 82 minutes, and its imagery, down to the cables plugged into the back of the neck, was borrowed by The Matrix. Some find it more interested in ideas than in people, but for cyberpunk that takes its source seriously, start here.
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The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
The 2011 Steven Spielberg film, a fusion of three of Hergé's albums led by The Secret of the Unicorn. Performance capture sounds like the wrong tool for clear-line drawing, but Weta Digital's stylized faces keep the exaggerated features of Hergé's art while the camera does things no illustrator could.
Andy Serkis is the real star as a bellowing, chaotic Captain Haddock, and Spielberg delivers some of the finest set pieces of his career. It is the best family choice on this list, a boy reporter and his dog on a treasure hunt with not a cape in sight.
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