Hollywood loves a remake, but audiences often don’t. There’s nothing worse than detecting the ghost of a decent movie behind a lazy, fast-tracked script and overpaid stars phoning it in. Worse still is the trend of remaking overseas successes in English – often just a lazy cash grab unworthy of the original (hello, The Grudge!)
But just occasionally, the cast and crew produce something with a lustre all of its own. Sometimes, the remake really is better than the original film. Here are 12 of the best.
The Departed
Martin Scorsese won his first Best Director Oscar for this wildly entertaining remake of the 2002 Cantonese crime thriller Infernal Affairs. The two moles are transposed from Hong Kong to Boston: Leonardo DiCaprio is the hot-blooded rookie cop going undercover as an Irish gang kid who cosies up to Jack Nicholson’s iconic mafia boss Frank Costello. Meanwhile, Matt Damon plays at being a whiter-than-white policeman, all the while feeding info back to Costello.
Scorsese takes a brilliant story and injects it with extra characterisation and brio, as well as a stonking Rolling Stones-dominated soundtrack.
Big
Da Grande is an 1987 Italian coming-of-age film about an embarrassed eight-year-old bedwetter in love with his school teacher who suddenly becomes a 40-year-old man. Inspired, Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg (sister of Steven) reportedly developed the story for this Tom Hanks classic in just one hour.
It’s Hanks’s charm that makes this 1988 film the ultimate body-swap tale. Surprisingly, he wasn’t even the original choice to play Josh: Harrison Ford, Warren Beatty, Kevin Costner and Robert De Niro were all in line for the lead before Hanks got it.
A Fistful of Dollars
When the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa saw Clint Eastwood’s breakout film in 1964 he wrote to its director Sergio Leone: “I have just had the chance to see your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film.” The similarities between Fistful and Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai blockbuster Yojimbo – about a nameless, wandering anti-hero who happens upon a town torn apart by criminal gangs – were so clear that Kurosawa launched a lawsuit which later won him financial compensation.
Multiple Kurosawa films were adapted for Hollywood, but this one is special. Despite its sneaky start, Fistful was the first spaghetti western and launched a whole new genre, defined by complex good guys, lush cinematography and dreamy Ennio Morricone scores.
Some Like it Hot
This incredibly quotable crime comedy classic starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and, of course, Marilyn Monroe, is actually based on Fanfare d’Amour, a 1935 French film about two male musicians who dress as women to join a band.
Director and screenwriter Billy Wilder added in the mafia chase that gives the 1959 film its drive, as well as a mordant humour perfectly delivered by the charismatic leads. They turn what could have been dumb farce into snappy, sophisticated comedy.
The Ring
While some prefer the dreamy quality of the original Japanese Ringu (1998), this 2002 remake starring a young Naomi Watts and set in a appropriately rainy Seattle is all the more unsettling for its modern narrative more firmly anchored in reality.
When teens start dying after seeing a creepy videotape (remember those?), journalist Rachel (Watts) starts investigating. There are a few plot holes and some silly sequels, but this is still a horror that sits with you long after watching.
True Lies
In James Cameron’s True Lies – a remake of the far more sedate 1991 French comedy La Totale! – Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis unite big-budget action and pantomime-y farce as a (sort of) spy couple double bluffing each other to form one of the silliest, most enjoyable blockbusters ever made. It’s like if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s Mr and Mrs Smith had been funny.
Just don’t think too hard about the misogyny inherent in kidnapping your own wife and subjecting her to professional interrogation techniques just to find out why she’s so unhappy at home.
Insomnia
Christopher Nolan’s 2002 remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name is an underrated gem, with all the psychological depth and lack of spectacle that made his earlier canon (Memento, The Prestige) so special.
Insomnia is superbly cast, with Al Pacino as the sleep-deprived cop outwitted by a smug, cast-against-type Robin Williams, and unforgettably filmed in the bright lights of a small Alaskan town in the eternal daylight of the summer months. The original starring Stellan Skarsgård is good; this is better.
The Parent Trap
Identical twin sisters separated at birth when their parents divorce find each other at holiday camp and vow to get their parents back together. The Parent Trap is Nancy Meyers’s directorial debut and Lindsay Lohan’s breakout film – what’s not to love?
Based on Two Times Lotte, a 1950 West German film (itself an adaptation of the 1949 German novel Lisa and Lottie), it’s a firm reminder of just how dazzling an actor Lohan was before she became better known for that naughty 2000s tabloid persona.
CODA
This controversial crowd-pleaser – based on the 2014 French-Belgian film La Famille Bélier (and retaining the original’s producer) – won the Best Picture Oscar in 2021. Despite featuring deaf actors, it frustrated some deaf viewers who felt that it brought recognition to their community only through a hearing person’s lens.
It stars Emilia Jones as the only hearing member of a deaf family, who tries to help the family’s struggling business while trying to become a singer. It is undoubtedly saccharine but also deeply warm-hearted, bringing deaf culture to a global audience in a new way as a result of both its predominantly deaf cast and its mainstream success.
Scent of a Woman
The original 1974 film Profumo di Donna was directed by Dino Risi, a master of the sardonic commedia all’italiana genre, and is a more merciless beast than its 1992 Hollywood do-over.
It’s harder to spend two hours with Vittorio Gassman’s irascible blind captain than Al Pacino’s cantankerous, suicidal Frank Slade, who fast becomes a deeply sympathetic lead. His burgeoning relationship with the poor, bemused prep student looking after him for the weekend (Chris O’Donnell) is very sweet, and Slade’s tango scene (Pacino won a Best Actor Oscar for the performance) is better than anything you’ll ever see on Strictly.
Funny Games
Austrian auteur Michael Haneke made a 2007 shot-for-shot English language remake of his own 1997 home invasion thriller, hoping to bring his story about our growing obsession with movie violence to a larger audience. Funny Games is terrifying in both English and German, particularly when Michael Pitt’s psychopath Paul breaks the fourth wall and winks at the camera.
It is only the slightly crisper 2000s technology that gives his second version the edge. Otherwise, this is an exercise in total mimicry, including similar acting approaches from stars Pitt, Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Brady Corbet as their predecessors.
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Scarlet Street
Lauded Austrian director Fritz Lang (Metropolis) took the storyline from Jean Renoir’s 1931 comic drama La Chienne and twisted it into a far darker, more obsessive tale about betrayal. It tells the story of a about a lovelorn bank clerk with lofty ambitions manipulated by a seductress and her boyfriend. It is fabulously bleak, incorporating Lang’s earlier expressionist techniques such as melodramatic shadows and mirrors, which heighten the sense of moral decrepitude.
This film is Lang’s second proper stab at American film noir after his hit The Woman in the Window. Lang was still adjusting to Hollywood when Scarlet Street was released in 1945, having left behind Nazi Germany (where Goebbels allegedly invited him to direct Nazi films before he emigrated).
