Book review: 'Film remakes' by Constantine Verevis

Review of the book 'Film remakes' by Constantine Verevis, published by Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2006. 'Not a patch on the old film' is likely to be the common response to most remakes, perhaps without too much thought going into the opinion. Or into what constitutes a film 'remake'. Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998) set a new level of tenacious adherence to its predecessor, the director avowedly setting out to re-film the Hitchcock classic virtually shot-by-shot. Mostly, though, we don't expect this kind of correspondence and we aren't normally so explicitly asked to have the earlier film in mind while we watch the remake.