Essentially I dig Sam Mendes' aesthetic. Revolutionary Road was slammed by dozens of critics but I felt it was completely brilliant; Road to Perdition was decent whereas Jarhead was a veritable stinker. I guess Mendes' oeuvre is a mixed bag.
I generally concur. I think Road to Perdition was worthwhile, just not on par with American Beauty; never saw Jarhead; and I want to see Revolutionary Road again. That last movie was not what I expected, but that was a good thing; and for me it was the first movie where I actually perceived DiCaprio as a grown man, rather than as a boy.
Anyway, King's fountainhead source material is almost always better than subsequent adaptions, although comparing two mediums is somewhat artificial.
I think that is the main issue. King's a great writer, and his stories work well on paper (well, most of them -- I think his work got more "hit or miss" as he aged) but aren't necessarily well-adapted to film... or at least not by the directors and writers that typically end up covering them. It's his style that seems so effortless and that pulls the audience in; the movie doesn't really have access to that.
I think for movies I most appreciated Shawshank (despite some deviations, it captured the "essence" of the story very very well, including the ending -- and the ending is actually the emotional mix that King pulls off so well in his work, and that people who categorize him as a "horror" writer really sometimes miss... it's not the horror that makes his work good but the struggle for hope and the moments of grace that punctuate even his darkest works).
Different Seasons was a solid bit of work on his part, all of the stories (although Breathing Method didn't really do much for me) were solid and memorable.
King was firing on all cylinders during the early eighties. Every author seems to be granted eight golden years a la William Faulkner. I've also noticed that most writers pen their magnum opus around age thirty two.
He really was. He really started to kick in, 2-3 books into his career (The Shining was probably the first book he really nailed) and he was consistent through much of the 80's, until he started releasing stuff like "The Eyes of the Dragon" and things began to vascillate a bit. I still have a warm space in my hard for The Tommyknockers, again because of that mix of "hope shining against the dark," but I also found the notion of transformation against one's will (and eventually changing so much that you no longer fight the change) to be rather horrifying. The digging out of the ship is also a metaphor for his style of writing.
Anyway... then things went to crap. You just don't know what you'll get from him nowadays, he's written too much. Even with The Dark Tower, probably some of his best work I've ever seen was in books #2-4, and then #5 was probably one of the worst, most boring titles I've seen from him and the series never quite approached what it had been when he was writing ten years earlier on it.
Occasionally he's still spot on. I thought his novella spin on the BTK killer (the story revolves around a wife discovering her husband was a serial killer, and how she responds to that horrific reality) was engrossing and well done.
hm; if the bad guy wins he may change history to write that he is the good one. 
