'Lolita': Stanley Kubrick or Adrian Lyne?

People who complain that the 62 version isn't explicitly enough probably aren't familiar with the book. It doesn't describe Humbert and Loita graphically having sex, the audience wouldn't be able to find him sympathetic if that were the case. The movie shows Humbert's manipulation with images the way the book does with words, we only see what Humbert would want us to. In that way it's the ideal companion piece to the novel. Some of the dialogue was sanitized, but in the grand scheme of things it wasn't that big of a deal. On top of that Mason is the perfect Humbert (nobody did faux-sophisticated eurotrash better) and Sellers and Winters are both really good.

Lyne seemed to be under the impression that the novel was a smut novel for pedophiles.

I would actually say both and neither - if you watch one, you need to see the other - and I agree with what's been written so far - the Kubrick version has elements that are akin to the book - humor and Humbert's perspective - its being censored forced a certain cleverness on it, and Lyne's film strips that veneer away and shows what the book is under that. It's about the book in a whole different way.

I think the performances are quite different - Mason comes off lighter and comic, Irons who is a not only a great actor but the greatest actor at portraying what lies between the male relationship to sex and love is foolish in a much more searing way. Sellers is wonderful (and complex) in the earlier film and Langella is more one note but more realistically frightening.

Like The Great Gatsby - another of the century's great novels - a film isn't capable (not yet anyway) of matching what we insert into the text. I've read the book a lot, and I never quite know how to take it - the comedy and the tragedy are all wonderfully mixed up, but the movies, as good as they are, tell me exactly how I should feel, the sense of mystery is gone.

I don't LOVE either of them, but for different reasons. To me the only thing in the Kubrick movie (I don't blame him, the movie is at least partly responsible for him never returning to the United States, but it still has his name stuck on it) that for me stands out is Sellers. He captures the sort of black humour of the book very well, some might say too well. It's hard to imagine not liking a movie so propped up by James Mason and Shelley Winters, but she's out of the picture too early, and he (moody on account of Sellers show stealing if you believe the stories) is as dull as I've probably ever seen him on screen. He could have used some of the devilish charm of his early work, and he'd have been perfect. The movie is not a very good adaptation, and it's a middling movie.

Lyne's movie is a TERRIBLE adaptation in all of its unbelievably stupid weepy earnestness, but for me it works much, much better as a movie overall. Irons is great, it's gorgeous to look at, Langella is really well used. Hell of a watch as long as you can overlook its source material.