"Jackie Brown"/Rum Punch is a great certain kind of example, in that it's very faithful to the book but truly adapted by a film artist to his sensibility, rather than taking the approach that it's all about choosing what to cut out and making it "cinematic" (which J.B. certainly is, I think it's the movie where QT became a Great Director, but that's a whole other topic).

Another type is "There Will Be Blood", which takes off from the book, only to land somewhere else entirely, again the right way to go, not only because that book is kind of boring, but because if it's not Paul Thomas Anderson through and through, what the hell is the point? Otherwise, it could be anybody doing it, with maybe a difference in camera style or something.

Then you can look at every Kubrick movie and the source material. Some are really close, some only superficially. All of them 100 percent Kubrick.

So the common theme here is these are writer/directors, unique artists making the translation, that's what 9 times out of ten will make it good, or at least worthwhile. What CRFilms said is as true of adaptations as it is originals when it comes to studio hatchet jobs (isn't it amazing how many movies you see with like 5 credited writers? WHY?)

I love so many adaptations of books and plays, but it does often give me pause to think how much of cinema is dependent on another art form to provide it's ideas, and then they dismissively but, from their POV, honestly, refer to these as "properties". A wonderful art form, a really awful industry.

I also think there's a lot of great "novelistic" cinema out there, with "Tree of Life" and, for a proper adaptation, "We Need To Talk About Kevin", springing immediately to mind as recent examples.

An interesting story is "Simulacron-3" by Daniel F. Galouye. Not that great as a novel, but became one of the most underrated Fassbinder films "Welt am Draht" (World on a Wire) – far ahead of it's time regarding such a subject in cinema. Only became mainstream with "Matrix" many years later. Just loosely connected with the novel, but they seem to have known the Fassbinder version. And then there was a relatively unimportant remake called "The 13th Floor", but supported by Fassbinder's DoP.