10 great films based on writing from The New Yorker

On 21 February 1925, the first issue of The New Yorker hit newsstands. A profile of an opera impresario, some scant pieces of high society gossip – there was little in that debut edition to indicate the literary titan the magazine would become. One hundred years later, it’s stronger than ever, having published many of the best writers in the world, profiled many of the leading historical figures, and broken a whole host of vital news stories. 

It should come as no surprise that a magazine that prints the best writing around would have inspired so much great movie criticism. From Lillian Ross’s reporting on John Huston’s attempts to make The Red Badge of Courage (1951) to Pauline Kael’s 1971 essay that argued Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote the near-entirety of the script for Citizen Kane (1941), not Orson Welles, there has always been a close relationship between the work the magazine publishes and the movie business. 

And often throughout its history, that relationship has been a symbiotic one. Over the last century, many films have been made based on writing that originally appeared in The New Yorker – both the fiction and the ground-breaking reportage. Although the magazine has a reputation for its seriousness, the films that have been adapted from its august pages run the gamut of genres. There have been dramas, comedies, romances and musicals, as well as productions just too experimental to classify. The only real throughline, it seems, is quality. 

Here are 10 of the very best:

Director: Vincente Minnelli

The perennial Christmas classic (despite not much of the film actually taking place at Christmas) originated as a series of narrative vignettes by Sally Benson, published in The New Yorker between 1941 and 1942 under the collective title ‘5135 Kensington’. Though the movie adaptation was written by Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe, Benson had notable screenplay credits of her own, most notably on Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and, later, Viva Las Vegas (1964).

Meet Me in St. Louis follows the adventures of a big family and their busy life in the eponymous town, over the course of the year 1903. Love is found and lost, dances are attended, injuries are had, lessons are learned, and many a song sung – the film boasted the debut screen outings of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ and ‘The Trolley Song’ (ironically, the title tune had already featured in The Strawberry Blonde, three years earlier). 

Director: Nicholas Ray

James Mason (who also produced) plays an overworked teacher diagnosed with a terminal arterial inflammation – the only hope for him is the still experimental drug cortisone. At first, it works a treat, and he feels better than ever before. Soon, however, the formerly mild-mannered man begins to turn into a monster with a god complex, putting his wife (Barbara Rush) and young son (Christopher Olsen) in terrible danger. 

Nicholas Ray’s movie does an excellent job of condensing the widespread issues surrounding the then apparent wonder drug – as reported in The New Yorker story ‘Ten Feet Tall’ by Berton Roueché – into the most intimate of domestic horror stories. At least 80% of the film takes place within the family home, and the exquisite orchestration of shadows, as well as the unusual application of the recently developed CinemaScope technology (which was generally used for Biblical epics and adventure movies), helps give Bigger than Life its deeply unnerving atmosphere. 

Director: Richard Brooks

Truman Capote’s revolutionary reportage, generally credited as giving birth to the True Crime genre, was first published over four weeks in September and October 1965 in The New Yorker. The essays were then compiled in the book In Cold Blood, which gave the movie adaptation its name. 

The film follows the murders of the Clutter family by Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson) and Perry Smith (Robert Blake), and the subsequent manhunt for the killers, all the way up to their eventual execution. Shot in chilly monochrome, and at many of the locations from the case itself (including the Clutter house, which was adorned with their real family photos), In Cold Blood is a grim story told with a complex empathy that cuts through the brutal crime at its centre. While never excusing nor minimising what Hickock and Smith did, both Capote and director Richard Brooks refuse to flatten them into monsters; their resolute humanness, despite the inhumanity of their crimes, is why In Cold Blood has haunted for decades. 

Director: Frank Perry

John Cheever was such a prolific short story writer, and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, it’s surprising that only one of his stories was ever adapted into a feature film (though his tales of quiet desperation among the wealthy men of upstate New York were a major touchstone for the HBO show Mad Men). 

In that one film, Burt Lancaster plays well-to-do advertising executive Ned Merrill, who decides to spend a lazy summer Sunday ‘swimming home’ from his friend’s house via a string of neighbourhood pools. As he takes on the unconventional journey, the seeming idyll of his life starts falling away, and he’s shown to be living a lie. Cheever’s story is rendered vividly via the dreamy direction of Frank Perry and the indelible central turn of Burt Lancaster; as much as anything else, it’s Lancaster’s extraordinary physicality – first powerful, then pathetic – that makes The Swimmer so unforgettable. 

Director: Spike Jonze

While every other entry on the list is simply based on a piece or pieces from The New Yorker, Adaptation uses its source essay as part of its meta, Matryoshka doll narrative. In the film, real life New Yorker writer Susan Orlean is played by Meryl Streep, and Orlean’s book, based on her real life New Yorker article, ‘Orchid Fever’ – about the adventures of a charismatic orchid hunter – is being adapted for the screen by Charlie Kaufman, who is struggling to work out how to write the screenplay. Kaufman is played by Nicolas Cage, but is also Adaptation’s actual screenwriter. In a sense, we’re watching a movie about the movie we are watching.

It sounds difficult to understand from that premise, but in actuality Adaptation is one of the notoriously prickly Kaufman’s warmest and most accessible works, which is simply about three people and their quest to find something worth living for in the face of life’s struggles and disappointments. And though she was bemused at first, the actual Susan Orlean came to really love the movie.

Director: Ang Lee

Originating as Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story, with poet of the American West Larry McMurtry doing the adaptation (along with writing partner Diana Ossana), the film tells the tale of Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger): two cowboys who fall in love while herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain in 1963. We follow them over the next 20 years as they both marry women and have children, yet never stop wishing for a way to be together.

Perhaps the most pivotal film of the New Queer Cinema movement, the tough and tender Brokeback Mountain won three Oscars (including one for McMurtry and Ossana’s screenplay), and would solidify its leading men as two of the finest actors of their generation. Tragically, Ledger would die three years later; watching him portray a man in middle-age knowing that he’d never get there himself adds another layer of pathos to an already deeply moving story. 

Director: Mira Nair

Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel started life as a 2003 short story in The New Yorker, which she later expanded. The Namesake tracks decades in the life of Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu) Ganguli: their marriage, their move from India to America, and the birth of their son Gogol (played by Kal Penn as an adult), named for his father’s favourite writer. It then becomes the story of Gogol, his struggle with his unusual name and with his identity as a second-generation immigrant. 

Taking place over 30 years, The Namesake is a sweepingly expansive yet warmly intimate exploration of how a family emotionally copes with being spread over two continents: the feeling of never being completely at home, the horror of a death happening when you’re thousands of miles away. But The Namesake finds plenty of joy in the experiences of the Ganguli family too, depicting a love that spans cultures and oceans. 

Director: Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley first read the Alice Munro short story ‘The Bear Came over The Mountain’ in The New Yorker when she was on a plane, travelling back from Iceland, where she’d been acting alongside Julie Christie in the Hal Hartley film No Such Thing (2001). Though she’d never directed before, the tale (which she called, “the only true love story”) refused to leave her head. It became her debut feature as a writer-director, and Christie her leading lady. 

Away from Her follows Fiona (Julie Christie) and her husband of 45 years, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), as she realises she’s developed Alzheimer’s disease. They check her into a nursing home, and he’s not allowed to visit for 30 days to give her time to adjust. When he returns, Fiona has fallen in love with another patient (Michael Murphy), and Grant must decide how to proceed. Sensitive and heart-wrenching, the film proved a remarkable start to former child actor Polley’s transition behind the camera. 

Director: Lee Chang-dong

The writing of renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami has been famously hard to adapt for the screen, his stories full of interiority, surrealism and ambiguity not lending themselves to a plot driven medium like cinema. Recent years, however, have shown it can be done, and done well – a prime example being Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, adapted from Murakami’s 1992 The New Yorker short story, ‘Barn Burning’.

When Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) meets up with childhood friend Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo) for the first time in many years, he’s immediately attracted to her and volunteers to cat sit while she goes on a long trip. When she comes back, she’s dating the handsome, rich, mysterious Ben (Steven Yeun). It could just be his jealousy talking, but Jong-su thinks there’s something very off about this new man – the languorously-paced, intoxicating Burning follows him as he investigates the enigmatic interloper and makes a drastic decision about his future. 

Director: David Lowery

The Old Man & the Gun tells the “mostly true” story of Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford): a gentleman in his seventies who loves robbing banks, and happens to be very good at it. He is pursued, albeit fondly, by beleaguered cop John Hunt (Casey Affleck). It was the second film to be adapted from a nonfiction David Grann piece in The New Yorker, after The Lost City of Z (2016).

Although most of the basic facts are true, screenwriter-director David Lowery positioned his production more as a love letter to its star (this would be his last leading role) than as a work of docufiction or a gritty heist thriller. The Old Man & the Gun is immensely charming, warm and lyrical: a folk tale unfurling like smoke above a glorious sunset. Lowery’s film is full of loving tributes to Redford’s movies – a fitting capper to the career of a man who’d been robbing banks on screen for more than 50 years.