25 best movie remakes ever

The remake is historically skating on thin ice. There’s a big difference between tales of folklore that can be retold a thousand times and the retelling of a truly cinematic property. So we’ve shunned stories of legend (Robin Hood), Shakespeare adaptations (Romeo + Juliet) and screenplays based on novels (True Grit) to come up with these, the 25 best movie remakes ever. In no particular order…

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Sergio Leone’s first instalment of what would become the Dollars Trilogy (followed by For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) was based on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, itself styled on John Ford’s westerns. Although Yojimbo means Bodyguard, we can assure you than neither Kurosawa’s samurai classic nor A Fistful of Dollars has any connection to the 1992 Houston-Costner smush-fest.