Cinematic

Some critics will read a book and call it cinematic. This usually mean it has short scenes, clearly motivated action and melodramatic moments. But what may seem "cinematic" in a book doesn't necessarily translate to the screen. Movies have their own language, and a novel still has to be translated properly to work in another medium.

Hence, we shouldn't be surprised if The Da Vinci Code doesn't work as a movie. (I haven't seen it yet--I'm just going by what the critics say.) George Lucas once said movies are binary--either they work or they don't. It takes a lot to make a movie work, which is why so few truly do. We should never be surprised when one doesn't.

Another format many call cinematic are graphic novels, but that's an even worse case. Long comic books may seem easy to translate into movies, but the form, where we fill in the action between the drawings, is very different from film. Thus a very faithful adaptation, like Sin City, doesn't really come across as well as the comic.