Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott were bound to be an odd couple in any case. All the richly composed and poetic dialogue in the world doesn't disguise the fact The Counselor is basically a grimy, scuzzy, sleazy, feel-bad potboiler.

There is an element of pulp to several of McCarthy's novels, but here it's brought to the forefront. As highly regarded as he is as a literary novelist, his subject matter is still mostly comprised of cowboys, bandits, whores, thieves, madmen,…

Books are books, and movies are movies. I usually don't want or expect any adaptation to copy its source -- in fact, it's usually in everyone's best interests for a derivative work to strive to be its own thing, and not… well, derivative. But Tom Tykwer and Lana & Larry Wachowski's Cloud Atlas turned out to be an astonishingly faithful adaptation of David Mitchell's novel. For a book so sprawling and commonly deemed unadaptable, I fully expected more characters and incident…