Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?

There are some great adaptations that hew very close to the source material. Anyone who had to read To Kill A Mockingbird in school and watched the film version afterward knows that the movie follows Harper Lee’s book very closely. In fact, the two are almost inseparable, where you can easily imagine the actors when reading the book.

Yet there are times when following the source material is just not enough. When Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone came out, some critics pointed out that Chris Columbus seemed too beholden to the book, refusing to take risks and directing a film that wouldn’t make fans angry. “Much as a film adaptation was inevitable, it’s almost a shame that Rowling’s fantastical universe has been lifted off the page, co-opted from the imagination of millions of readers,” said Scott Tobias in his review for the AV Club. On the site, first Columbus-helmed two films were the worst reviewed films of the series.

When Alfonso Cuarón took over, his style of magical realism went over much better. “With shades of Carrie, Harry’s magical powers and adolescent angst make a combustible fusion, taking on frightening, vengeful implications that Cuarón honors by refusing to airbrush the shadowy regions of fantasy,” Tobias writes. (In this same review, he uncharitably calls Columbus a “hack auteur.”)

Bonus prompt: which movie adaptation do you wish took more liberties with the source material?