Adrian Lyne:

In the movies, point of view is everything. One of the triumphs of Nabokov's novel - among other things, a fantastic transliteration of clinical psychosis - is the way it leads us inside Humbert's head without ever sealing us off from the outside world. Unfortunately, the point of view in Lyne's film - which sees Lolita as only a temptress in ankle socks - isn't Humbert's alone. It's also that of the filmmakers.

When Lolita kisses Humbert for the first time in Lyne's movie, his lips barely part; later, when she rocks herself energetically on his lap - head tossed back, mouth trembling, diffused light shimmering - his hand merely grazes her arm as she shivers with pleasure. (This Humbert may be a child molester - a soul killer - but he's a really special kind of child molester: He makes his little girl cum.) In these scenes, we're not in Humbert's demented consciousness; we're just voyeurs basking in the screen's softcore glow.

But the closer we are to the humping, the further we are from Nabokov and Kubrick both. Although Kubrick cast an actress as old as Swain to play Lolita, and while the sex between his odd couple isn't much more than a glint in Humbert's eye, he got the novel in the way Lyne never does because he knew that what counts in Lolita isn't the pervert and his prey; what counts is how the story is told - the syntax and grammar of Humbert's passion, and of his insanity.

So Kubrick fired up the cha-cha-cha and the snickering middle-class hypocrisy, and let loose Shelley Winters as "the Haze woman" (a wistful Melanie Griffith, herself a worn-out Lolita, has the role here) and a shape-shifting Peter Sellers as Humbert's enigmatic nemesis, Clare Quilty (Frank Langella in the new version). Against the odds, Kubrick even glanced on the stunning denouement of Nabokov's novel - he gave Lolita back her humanity, if only for a few brief minutes. For his part, Lyne cleaves to a kind of decorous period realism, swaps wink-wink smarminess for satire, peeps up Lolita's dress, throws a gauzy sheen over the lens and misinterprets Nabokov's novel about as badly as it's possible to imagine. Which is probably why, unlike Kubrick, Lyne seems to think that what he's actually done is make a tragedy about a nut job named Humbert Humbert rather than a tragedy about a very human girl called Lolita. "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style," Humbert claims, in one of the novel's slyest asides. You can say pretty much the same about a bad filmmaker.