"I helped it. Didn’t I help it? I just took it back, is all. Awful tired now, boss. Dog tired."
The movies haven’t always been kind to Stephen King. For every The Shining andMisery there is a Dreamcatcher or Maximum Overdrive (which he directed himself - ouch). Luckily, Frank Darabont knows how to take King’s graphic-but-humane prose and turn it into magical cinema. He followed up his revered adaptation of King’s The Shawshank Redemption with this tale of incarceration and the supernatural, starring Tom Hanks as prison officer Paul Edgecom, who begins to suspect that gentle giant inmate John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) may not only be falsely accused of child murder but might also have paranormal powers. The film is epic and moving, shocking us with visceral executions while still finding time to make us laugh in between. As close to a pure adaptation of King as you can get.