Watchmen

Skippable, and it is the most interesting argument about adaptation in this catalogue. The source had been called unfilmable for twenty years, and Zack Snyder's response was to film it almost exactly: panels become shots, dialogue is transcribed, and the layout of the book is reproduced on screen.

That fidelity is both the achievement and the problem. The comic works partly through its form, through nine-panel grids and supplementary documents and the reader's pace, and reproducing the images without the form produces something that looks right and moves wrong. Several of the book's quieter effects become, in motion, slow-motion violence set to a needle drop.

Where it is superb is the opening. A six-minute title sequence set to Bob Dylan, walking through four decades of an alternate American history with masked vigilantes in the photographs, is the best thing Snyder has directed and conveys more than the next hour does. Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Comedian are both exactly right.

Which version matters. The theatrical cut is a hundred and sixty-two minutes; a Director's Cut adds about twenty-five; and an Ultimate Cut of around three and a half hours interleaves an animated version of the comic-within-the-comic. The ending is changed from the book and is, most people now accept, a sensible change. Nothing else here is connected to it.