Items25The creator’s order
  1. 1Road to Perdition (2002)Road to Perdition (2002) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 12, 2002Max 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…0
  2. 2A History of Violence (2005)A History of Violence (2005) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 23, 2005Few 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…0
  3. 3Sin City (2005)Sin City (2005) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased Apr 1, 2005If 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…0
  4. 4Oldboy (2003)Oldboy (2003) 8.3/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 21, 2003The 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…0
  5. 5From Hell (2001)From Hell (2001) 6.7/10 on IMDbReleased Feb 8, 2001Alan 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…0
  6. 6Lady Snowblood (1973)Lady Snowblood (1973) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 1, 1973Kill 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…0
  7. 7American Splendor (2003)American Splendor (2003) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased Aug 15, 2003The 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…0
  8. 8Persepolis (2007)Persepolis (2007) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 27, 2007Marjane 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…0
  9. 9The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) 6.8/10 on IMDbReleased Aug 7, 2015Phoebe 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…0
  10. 10My Friend Dahmer (2017)My Friend Dahmer (2017) 6.2/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 3, 2017True 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…0