I find Branagh’s Henry V vastly superior to Oliver’s.
This may be unpopular, but I prefer William Friedkin’s Sorcerer to the original The Wages of Fear. TWoF was a movie of its time. We don’t see the suspenseful events happening so much as we’re supposed to read the tension on the faces of the actors. And the ending pretty much comes out of nowhere. The remake was apparently a very difficult shoot, but when the trucks are driving over creaking bridges or past yawning chasms, we actually get to see it. And the ending is equally downbeat, but is a direct consequence of what happened earlier in the film.
On that note, Never Say Never Again is better than Thunderball but not by much. There’s better acting and it erases some of plot snags of the original Thunderball but suffers from the fact it literally didn’t know if it wanted to be a spoof of Bond or a straight Bond film so you get scenes that are completely serious to scenes that are so self-referential they literally break the fourth wall.
If the next Daniel Craig Bond film was just another remake of Thunderball I actually think they could pull it off well.
The 2001 anime, Metropolis, keeps a few thematic elements from the 1927 film, but otherwise allows itself to go its own way.
The original is to socialism as The Fifth Element is to love and war - about as deep as a kiddie pool, but looking fine while doing it. The latter has some decent story and thoughtful moments, color, sound, and a decent soundtrack.
What is “the remake in between”? As far as I know there have been three cinematic versions of the story:
1951 - The Thing from Another World
1982 - John Carpenter’s The Thing
2011 - The Thing
The 2011 version is a prequel to the 1982 film and inferior in every respect. The one that goes back to Campbell’s original short story is the 1982 version.
Horror Express with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
I have to disagree with you on this one. The original was a B movie, car heist flick with pretty much no story other than the bad guys trying to make their quota. The whole movie builds toward one of the greatest chase scenes ever filmed, with escape after escape resulting in totalling the target car…with the big save at the end !
The remake was a more glitzy, intended to be grittier “man forced to do one last job” angle, with ridiculous stunts. And I thought it missed the mark, and was not all that entertaining.