The latest in a line of movies from literary greats -- following "The Road," "Where the Wild Things Are" and a re-imagined Sherlock Holmes -- is released this week: Tennessee Williams' "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond." The work has never earned the respect of others such as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or "A Streetcar Named Desire." But it has many of the hallmarks of his greats, including sultry, rebellious women and class conflict. Some reviews:

-- The Los Angeles Times: Never produced, then shelved these last 50 years (I suspect because it feels like an early draft), "Teardrop Diamond" comes to us with its characters not fully fleshed to their breaking or boiling point ... [yet filmmaker Jodie Markell] succeeds in transporting us back to that other time; capturing the lyricism of the dialogue and the fetid South that Williams so brilliantly envisioned where nearly everything goes to rot.

-- The New York Times: Bryce Dallas Howard ignites like a firecracker, playing an impulsive, emotionally unstable heiress recklessly defying the hidebound conventions of 1920s Memphis high society. ... [Her] character, Fisher Willow, has the familiar hallmarks of a wounded Williams angel but lacks the tragic dimension of his greatest creation, Blanche DuBois.

-- Associated Press: The best thing "Teardrop Diamond" does, with its familiar Williams archetypes and his trademark Southern Gothic, is make you feel like renting some of the playwright's more substantial work, where desperation, alcohol and love mixed more dreamily and more heartbreakingly.