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20. The Vanishing (1993)
Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) obsesses over the fate of his missing girlfriend in George Sluizer’s American remake of his own 1988 Franco-Dutch psychochiller. Is it as devastating as the original? Absolutely not! But Jeff Bridges has never been creepier, and at least the dumb Hollywood ending won’t give you nightmares.
19. Funny Games (2007)
In case we sickos didn’t get the message in 1997, Austrian gloom-meister Michael Haneke recycles his brutally efficient home invasion diatribe shot-for-shot, but this time in English. Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet play polite young men who knock on Naomi Watts’ door and ask to borrow eggs. What happens next will harsh your vibe.
18. Dinner for Schmucks (2010)
Steve Carell plays Barry Speck, whose passion is building dead mice dioramas, making him the perfect stooge for a dinner party where rich scumbags mock eccentric losers. Hollywood sweetens an acidic French farce, Le Dîner de Cons (1998), and bungles its subplots, but compensations include Carell going full-on nerd and Jemaine Clement as a pretentious artist.
17. Oldboy (2013)
You can’t fault Josh Brolin’s commitment to his role as an alcoholic advertising executive trying to discover why he was held prisoner for 20 years in Spike Lee’s Americanisation of Park Chan-wook’s baroque revenge thriller. But an uneasy mix of neo-noir realism and South Korean stylisation makes it feel like a half-baked copy of the 2003 masterpiece.
16. Speak No Evil (2024)
Those who prefer their horror grim should stick with the 2002 Danish-Dutch original. James Watkins’ do-over, in which an American family goes to stay with the friendly Britons they met on holiday, is more conventional, but also more fun, with James McAvoy attaining peak psycho as a host testing the limits of his guests’ good manners. That damnable stuffed rabbit appears in both versions.
15. The Birdcage (1996)
If you must film an American version of a hit French farce, you might as well get Elaine May to write the dialogue, as Mike Nichols does here. Gay couple Armand and Albert (Robin Williams and Nathan Lane) try to pass as straight when their son’s fiancee’s parents come to dinner. Chucklesome complications include Gene Hackman, bless him, dressed in drag.
14. The Grudge (2004)
Takashi Shimizu directs the US remake of his own haunted house franchise, but keeps it in Tokyo, with American actors imported to play cannon fodder for Greasy-Haired Ghost and Small Boy Who Makes Mewing Noises. The story is confusing, which somehow makes the scary bits (the lift! Oh good grief, the bedclothes!) even scarier.
13. Unfaithful (2002)
Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle (1969) gets the Hollywood treatment from Adrian Lyne, with unexpectedly classy results. Diane Lane is wonderful as an unhappy housewife who embarks on an affair, while her husband (Richard Gere) finds murdering her lover more therapeutic than any amount of marriage counselling.
12. Vanilla Sky (2001)
Tom Cruise plays a New York yuppie whose reality starts to fragment after a car crash. Writer and director Cameron Crowe transposes Alejandro Amenábar’s lower budgeted brain teaser from Madrid to Manhattan; Penélope Cruz plays the girlfriend in both versions. Crowe is no Amenábar, alas, but he does have a bigger star, and more pop music.
11. Insomnia (2002)
Christopher Nolan’s remake of a 1997 Norwegian thriller will seem perfectly acceptable to anyone who hasn’t seen the tauter, more claustrophobic original. Al Pacino plays a Los Angeles detective summoned north to investigate a murder in Alaska, where constant daylight and lack of sleep lead to a fatal error. Robin Williams, in one of his three creepy performances that same year, plays the killer.
10. Sweet Charity (1960)
Bob Fosse made his screen directing debut with the film of the Broadway show based on Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). Shirley MacLaine plays the ever-hopeful taxi dancer with a talent for picking the wrong guy. It flopped, but nowadays we can only gaze in awe at impeccably choreographed musical numbers such as the Rich Man’s Frug.
9. True Lies (1994)
James Cameron pumps testosterone and money into what began as a modest French action-comedy, La Totale! (1991). Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, a superspy whose wife thinks he’s a boring salesman. Cameron distracts you from the film’s mean-spirited elements by blowing up half the Florida Keys.
8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestseller is slicker than its 2009 Swedish predecessor, is set to a terrific Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score, and features fake Swedish accents from everyone except Daniel Craig and Stellan Skarsgård. What it doesn’t have is the 2009 film’s Noomi Rapace, the definitive Lisbeth Salander.
7. The Departed (2006)
Martin Scorsese finally won an Oscar for his remake of the cracking Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (2002). Leonardo DiCaprio plays a cop in deep cover with the Boston mafia, Matt Damon a mobster who has infiltrated the police. It’s a lot baggier than its prototype, and further knocked off balance by Jack Nicholson’s untrammelled scenery chewing as mob boss Frank Costello.
6. Let Me In (2010)
Matt Reeves does a decent job of Americanising Tomas Alfredson’s vampire masterpiece, with the Swedish housing estate replaced by Reagan-era New Mexico, where a bullied 12-year-old schoolboy befriends the mysterious girl next door. Reeves tends to spell out what might be better left implicit, but comes into his own in some added action sequences.
5. The Ring (2002)
While most American J-horror remakes dilute their originals, Gore Verbinski’s reworking of Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998) whips up an entirely different but no less nerve-racking ambience, making full use of a bigger budget, Pacific Northwest locations and Naomi Watts as the journalist investigating a viral death curse spread by VHS.
4. Wrath of Man (2021)
Though not as lean and mean as Le Convoyeur (2004), its French progenitor, Guy Ritchie’s revenge thriller does its own thing, ties an initially simple narrative into convoluted knots, and unleashes Jason Statham on a hardboiled cast playing armoured truck guards. All this without any of the laddishness that mars some of Ritchie’s other work, making this his most satisfying film in years.
3. Quick Change (1990)
Bill Murray co-directs as well as stars in this nifty remake of Hold-Up (1985), a French Canadian action comedy starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. Murray is at his sardonic best as Grimm, a bankrobber disguised as a clown. The robbery is easy; the hard part is trying to get out of town with the loot. Whereas the original gets bogged down in car chases, Murray’s remake keeps it tense and funny to the end.
2. Sorcerer (1977)
William Friedkin said his adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel was not a remake, but since it had already been filmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot as The Wages of Fear (1953), let’s call it one anyway. Either way, this action-thriller about four expat losers driving dynamite-laden trucks across rugged Latin American terrain is now almost as much of a classic as its antecedent, enhanced by Tangerine Dream’s haunting score and Roy Scheider’s demonstrating the ultimate thousand-yard stare.
1. The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies were already heavily influenced by the western genre, so it wasn’t hard for Hollywood to convert Seven Samurai (1954) back into a bona fide oater. Yul Brynner plays gunslinger Chris, who persuades six mercenaries to protect a Mexican village from bandits, then spends the rest of the film trying not to get upstaged by Steve McQueen, James Coburn and an Elmer Bernstein score that makes you break out in goose pimples. One of the best remakes ever.
