Pretty much everyone in the Lord of the Rings movies and the Harry Potter movies.
Walter Matthau As Mr Wilson in Dennis The Menace.
My opinions are colored by Bored of the Ring, but I see Woody Allen as Aragorn.
Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster, Stephen Fry as Jeeves.
Derek Jacobi as Brother Cadfael.
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Now let me stress that I am NOT a huge Hoffman fanboy and I do not think he was that great in Capote. However - he absolutely killed the role of Freddie, in Ripley. I think that is the single best role of his career so far, and I cannot see him topping it.
Bill Campbell as Cliff Secord, and Jennifer Connelly as Jenny Blake, in The Rocketeer.
Much of the cast of* High Fidelity *was spot on, but the dude who played Dick (Todd Louiso according to imdb. Nope, never heard of him either) was just perfect.
Daniel Emilfork as Krank in the City of Lost Children. It’s a real shame that guy turned to acting, because he had the absolute perfect face to be a mad scientist or a gestapo official of some kind.
Jackie Earle Haley was a wonderful Rorschach in Watchmen. The face, the eyes, the delivery… a perfect fit.
And I know I’m in a minority on one on this, but Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka was stupendous.
I saw Superman the Movie on TV a few months ago and I was just about completely sucked into it just like when I was in second grade. Christopher Reeve is Superman.
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector and as Abraham Van Helsing
When they were advertising THE AVENGERS movie, I thought “Damn! Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman as John Steed and Emma Peel!?! WONDERFUL!”
The reality was a hard hard blow to take.
Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee as Sgt Howie and Lord Summerisle- THE WICKER MAN.
Everyone in the new STAR TREK movie but especially Karl(?) Urban as McCoy.
Ah yes, I thought Christine Taylor and Jennifer Elise Cox were excellently cast as Marcia and Jan Brady in the Brady Bunch Movie.
She’s also remembered for her singing as well, sort of. She’s immortalized in the ever-changing English version of the lyrics of Mack the Knife. According to Wikipedia, she was in the studio when Louis Armstrong recorded his version and he improvised her name “Look out Miss Lotte Lenya.” When Bobby Darrin recorded his version, he used the name as well. The song was written by her husband, Kurt Weill, and Lenya had recorded it before Armstrong or Darrin.
Jeremy Irons as Humpbert Humpbert.
I think the casting for the new movie of Star Trek was really great. Especially Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Talk about well established characters!
Alec Guinness as George Smiley.
Al Pacino as Satan in Devil’s Advocate.
Oh God, Gary Cole as the dad was brilliantly funny.
I came in to suggest (although not based on a work of fiction) that Val Kilmer was uniquely suited to play Jim Morrison in The Doors.
But I’d also like to put in a word for the ensemble cast of the “real” Three Musketeers movies, i.e. Richard Lester’s Three and Four Musketeers. It’s hard to imagine a better Athos than Oliver Reed, a better D’Artangnan than Michael York, or a better Milady than Faye Dunaway, and the good casting ran all the way down to the smaller roles as well.
Also, Richard Burton as Petruchio and Elizabeth Taylor as Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew struck me as dead on casting. Then there’s Peter O’Toole in both My Favorite Year and The Stuntman. Oh, and along side Katharin Hepburn mentioned above in The Lion in Winter. God, what a cast that was!
Speaking of Sir Alec Guinness: Ewan McGregor as the young Obi Wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith. Say what you wish about the rest of the movie, that bit was spot-on.
The guy Steve Buscemi played in Desperado.
He played the character of Buscemi, according to IMDB.
I can’t get past the fact that Blackthorne is supposed to be a “big blond barbarian bastard with blue eyes” and Chamberlain is…not that.