Un-Friending Hawthorne? Near the top of the list of film adaptations that drive literature professors to angry distraction is surely Roland Joffe’s The Scarlet Letter from 1995, a big budget Hollywood version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel. Beautifully shot and interestingly performed by a diverse range of actors—as Hester Prynne, Demi Moore, a young movie ...

America’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Vampire From the point of view of literary criticism, the most shocking scene in any of the Twilight movies occurs early in the last of the five film series, Breaking Dawn, Part Two. The clairvoyant vampire, Alice leaves a clue for the heroine Bella, written atop the title page ...

Top Hats Without Aura When the hoopla about Christopher Nolan’s overwrought, trite, and overrated Batman trilogy subsides, it will become clear that the director’s masterpiece is The Prestige, a 2006 film based on Christopher Priest’s 1995 eponymous novel. The plot concerns a rivalry between two late 19th century magicians, the upper class Robert Angier (played ...