Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

I finally watched 2009′s A Christmas Carol, written and directed by Robert Zemeckis, with Jim Carrey as a motion-captured Scrooge. I was seriously impressed. Despite what some critics have said, I think the film’s visual style perfectly suits the material. Charles Dickens’ 1843 story is a fantasy about ghosts, time travel, and Christmas. It can [...]

Blame my dentist for this one. I was strapped into the chair. While he rooted around in my gaping maw, we were jawing about movies, and he mentioned he’d recently let his 12-year-old son watch The Exorcist (1973). The boy found the movie, and I’m quoting here, “lame.” The Exorcist is, of course, based on William [...]

A while back I briefly mentioned Fatherland, the 1994 television movie based on Robert Harris’s 1992 thriller about a German police detective investigating a homicide (and uncovering a high-level conspiracy). I recently watched the movie again, and I’d forgotten just how gripping it is. The novel is set in 1964. Preparations for the celebration of [...]

After there was Cowboys & Aliens the movie — well, not after: at roughly the same time — there was Cowboys & Aliens the novel, published by Tor and written by Joan D. Vinge. Novelizations, books written from screenplays, can be pretty awful (I have a few things to say about them over here), but this [...]

Before there was Cowboys & Aliens the movie — a splendid movie, why didn’t more of you go and see it? — there was Cowboys & Aliens the graphic novel, published in 2006 by Platinum Studios and created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. With words by Andrew Foley and Fred Van Lente, and terrific artwork by Dennis [...]

Thinner, Stephen King’s 1984 novel published under the short-lived Richard Bachman pseudonym, is a clever tale of a man, a Gypsy curse, and the world’s most unpleasant weight-loss plan. The plot is simple.  Billy Halleck, a vastly overweight lawyer, is being, um, entertained by his wife while he’s driving their car. Because he’s not paying [...]

It’s come to my attention that David Fincher, director of such excellent films as The Social Network, Zodiac, and Se7en, is going to be making a movie out of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This won’t be the first movie, of course. In fact it won’t be the fifth. There  have [...]

According to this article at the Hollywood Reporter’s website, A&E is going to air a four-part miniseries based on Stephen King’s 1998 novel Bag of Bones, to be directed by King veteran Mick Garris (The Stand, Desperation, Riding the Bullet, the quite bad television version of The Shining). Pierce Brosnan, my third favorite James Bond, [...]

I’ve always considered 1991′s The Firm to be, in terms of its story if not its writing (the author has markedly improved as a storyteller over the years), to be one of John Grisham’s better early novels. I didn’t much like the 1993 Sydney Pollack movie, with Tom Cruise as Mitch McDeere, the law school [...]

Just about a year ago (right here, in fact) I let you know that there was going to be a new movie version of John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The trailer is now online. It looks real good. Check it out: