Top American Adaptations of Foreign Movies

If you like your vampire movies sensitive, with a heavy helping of gore, “Let Me In” is for you. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays a bullied kid whose lone friend is a girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who only comes out at night. He begins to suspect something is wrong when her caretaker disappears and a string of murders ensues.

Tom Hanks plays Otto, a widower who, despondent over the death of his wife, keeps trying to kill himself. When new neighbors move in next door, Otto forms an unlikely bond with the expectant mother Marisol (Mariana Treviño). Its Swedish predecessor by seven years stars Rolf Lassgård as a widowed pensioner with a short temper who’s obsessed with enforcing block association rules.

Christopher Nolan directed this thriller about a Los Angeles detective (Al Pacino) sent to an Alaskan town in the region of the midnight sun to investigate the murder of a teenage girl, where he is tormented by a suspect (Robin Williams) who tests the boundaries of his sanity. The Norwegian film that “Insomnia” is based on placed the detectives in the midnight sun region of Norway where the stress of an accidental shooting of one detective by another and the ever-present sun wreak havoc on the detective (Stellan Skarsgård) chasing the killer.

Roy Scheider, who collaborated with director William Friedkin in “The French Connection,” partnered with the moviemaker to make “Sorcerer,” a story about four desperate men trying to transport unstable explosives through a politically unstable Latin American country. European stars Yves Montand and Peter Van Eyck star in the original.

This comedy/drama stars Cary Grant as a college professor and physician whose unorthodox but effective methods make him popular among students and patients. A teaching rival (Hume Cronyn) tries to use the professor’s connection to an unwed pregnant student against him. In the German original released one year prior, the antagonist of Doctor Praetorious was played by Erich Ponto, whom classic-film buffs might remember as Dr. Winkel in “The Third Man.”