In this reasoned guide, film theorist Robert Stam examines the origin of prejudices against the adaptation of literary texts to film, and shows how they are all subverted by adopting perspectives such as those offered by studies on intertextuality, deconstruction, and culturology, and by studying the forms of reception that occur when films are viewed on digital media. To account for the aesthetic richness of the adaptations, the author proposes to use narratological analysis, since its categories allow manipulation of narrative time in cinema and strategies for the construction of the cinematographic point of view This proposal is complemented by the study of the contextual conditions in which each adaptation occurs. In short, here it is proposed to build a theory of adaptation that is based on moralistic attitudes that only confirm a supposed aesthetic superiority of literature. From this theory one could think of adaptation as a general framework to understand any film and not only those that adapt a literary text, since every film (like any cultural product) is the result of various processes of translation and rewriting, which Stam himself calls continuous loving processes of exchange of textual flows.