From the bright lights of Broadway to the dimly lit local movie theater, there's a slow and steady migration of stories. Every year, some of the season's best scripts are harvested and re-produced on film. It's a beautiful thing. While I strongly believe that the artistic experience created in a theater relies on the physical space and the energy of the audience, I also believe the advanced production technologies and unlimited settings unique to film add a depth of experience that is equally as compelling. In short, a film version of a script can be just as good as the original stage version. Take a look at just a few of the incredible recent reproductions that span genres and delight audiences both on and off the stage.

Patrick Marber's Closer, nominated last year for two Oscars and several other awards, is the best example yet this century of a really solid play skillfully morphed into a blockbuster movie. The story is a painfully revealing look at love and sex in modern society. In its American opening at the Music Box Theatre, a powerful foursome led by Natasha Richardson took audiences through a meticulously directed and almost clinical examination of relationships and dysfunction that was most remarkable for its starkness. For a film to capture that dissection of romantic interaction so carefully and with the same effect, it would have to consciously avoid the common movie pitfalls that lose so many good scripts in an effort to polish up the rough edges and make brighter, shinier versions of the story. Mike Nichols was able to sidestep those pitfalls with ease. Employing a telescopic view of the timeline and generous jump cuts between and within scenes, Nichols managed to convey the story even better on film than Marber had on stage. When emotion runs so deeply within each character, the artful use of close-ups and framing can evoke more than a well-acted performance in the theater ever could. A hugely talented and famous cast including Julia Roberts and Clive Owen also lends itself to good storytelling, but I think these actors shone more in the film than they could have on stage.

Completely on the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Phantom of the Opera also ranks highly on my list of film adaptations. While I'm no fan of Andrew Lloyd Weber's epic shows, millions of devoted followers love the baroque productions and rudimentary scripting . To give credit where it is due: as mass-produced cultural phenomena go, Phantom gets an A+ for effort. The original show shattered the ceiling of production budgets for musicals, it brought operatic music back to popular culture, and the strange romance of Christine and the Phantom seems to have resonated with audiences all over the world. Phantom of the Opera is the epitome of the enormous "Broadway Musical", and the film version offers the same richness, plus some. It's not a low-budget film. It's not an artistic film. It's not a new interpretation of the story or an attempt to uncover new layers of meaning in the original. It is the cinematic equivalent of eating crème brûlée on a velvet cushion, draped in silk, in the well-appointed dining room of a marble palace. It's lush. For all those devoted fans of the musical, this film delivers familiarity and spectacle in spades. It's not so much the direction or the acting that makes this a great adaptation. Rather, it's the faithful transfer of the well-loved classic to a broader setting. More elaborate scenes and more elaborate costumes make a more elaborate experience. Removing the physical constraints of a stage allowed this story to grow even bigger than it already was.

Falling somewhere between the two aforementioned productions in terms of style is Michael Radford's 2004 remake of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. I won't bore you with the obligatory review of the script and story. There's a reason Shakespeare's works have become the sine qua non of theatrical literacy. What's unique about this version of the story is the liberal, yet careful, use of all that modern filmmaking has to offer. Deep, evocative colors and settings create a framework for this retelling that enhances the poetry of the language rather than distracting from it. Radford recalls his Il Postino (one of my favorite movies) in the uniquely Italian lighting and deeply-rooted visual metaphors. The cast performs well within these constructions— even Al Pacino slid into his character of Shylock witih ease. If you had, like I had, begun to fear that Baz Luhrmann would continue to drag The Bard's stories down the slippery slope of glitz and choreography, take heart. Michael Radford's Merchant proves a formidable defense.

Many of my contemporaries shy away from praising film adaptations of our favorite scripts. There is a justifiable fear that if we encourage Hollywood to contribute its own perspective, we'll wind up with more 10 Things I Hate About Yous than Closers. Nevertheless, I'm willing to take the risk. If audiences that sift through 25 painfully shallow remakes ultimately are rewarded with a jewel like any of the films mentioned here, it seems worth it. Besides, if filmmakers are spending all that time producing and re-producing Cats, maybe they won't have time to make Basic Instinct 3.