There are genuine stylistic flourishes. There are very moving moments and very funny moments. There is not enough of either, however, to make the movie anything but a worthy effort at translating into another medium a novel whose heart and soul, its inner workings, rely on the written word, and on references to other works of literature. There is not, for example, a real cinematic equivalent for the shades of Poe that haunt the novel. Nor for the duplicity of our narrator, Humbert Humbert.
Film is straightforward.
What you see is what you get. Just ask Frank Langella. The material I've found most helpful in approaching Lolita were the pertinent chapters of Brian Boyd's The American Years , the second volume in the authoritative Nabokov biography. Introduction by Martin Amis. A Janus Text By Vladimir Nabokov.