The English Patient (1996) - IMDb IMDb 17 January 2017 4:34 PM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error At the close of WWII, a young nurse tends to a badly-burned plane crash victim. His past is shown in flashbacks, revealing an involvement in a fateful love affair. Director: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 35 titles created 02 Aug 2012 a list of 25 titles created 18 Jul 2013 a list of 34 titles created 13 Dec 2013 a list of 23 images created 06 Jan 2014 a list of 40 titles created 03 Feb 2014 Title: The English Patient (1996) 7.4/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.

You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 9 Oscars. Another 49 wins & 66 nominations. See more awards » Videos A young Shakespeare, out of ideas and short of cash, meets his ideal woman and is inspired to write one of his most famous plays. Director: John Madden Lt. John Dunbar, exiled to a remote western Civil War outpost, befriends wolves and Indians, making him an intolerable aberration in the military. Director: Kevin Costner In 20th-century colonial Kenya, a Danish baroness/plantation owner has a passionate love affair with a free-spirited big-game hunter. Director: Sydney Pollack The story of the final Emperor of China. Director: Bernardo Bertolucci Murderesses Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart find themselves on death row together and fight for the fame that will keep them from the gallows in 1920s Chicago. Director: Rob Marshall Selfish yuppie Charlie Babbitt's father left a fortune to his savant brother Raymond and a pittance to Charlie; they travel cross-country.

Director: Barry Levinson An old Jewish woman and her African-American chauffeur in the American South have a relationship that grows and improves over the years. Director: Bruce Beresford Ted Kramer's wife leaves her husband, allowing for a lost bond to be rediscovered between Ted and his son, Billy. But a heated custody battle ensues over the divorced couple's son, deepening the wounds left by the separation. Director: Robert Benton Los Angeles citizens with vastly separate lives collide in interweaving stories of race, loss and redemption. Director: Paul Haggis Two British track athletes, one a determined Jew and the other a devout Christian, compete in the 1924 Olympics. Director: Hugh Hudson A silent movie star meets a young dancer, but the arrival of talking pictures sends their careers in opposite directions. Director: Michel Hazanavicius A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic. Director: James Cameron Edit Storyline October 1944 in war torn Italy. Hana, a French-Canadian nurse working in a mobile army medical unit, feels like everything she loves in life dies on her.

Because of the difficulty traveling and the dangers, especially as the landscape is still heavily booby-trapped with mines, Hana volunteers to stay behind at a church to care solely for a dying semi-amnesiac patient, who is badly burned and disfigured. She agrees to catch up to the rest of the unit after he dies. All the patient remembers is that he is English and that he is married. Their solitude is disrupted with the arrival at the church of fellow Canadian David Caravaggio, part of the Intelligence Service, who is certain that he knows the patient as a man who cooperated with the Germans. Caravaggio believes that the patient's memory is largely in tact and that he is running away from his past, in part or in its entirety. The patient does open up about his past, all surrounding his work as a cartographer in North Africa, which ... Written by Huggo In love, there are no boundaries.

See more » Genres: Rated R for sexuality, some violence and language | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 6 December 1996 (USA) See more » Also Known As: El paciente inglés See more » Filming Locations: $278,439 (USA) (15 November 1996) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia Ralph Fiennes ' burnt head make-up had not only to be medically accurate but had also to subtly reflect map-making and cartography, one of the film's major themes. See more » Goofs Just after Katherine pretends to faint at the Christmas party, we see Almásy remove his red paper crown. In the next shot, as Katherine is leaving the party, Almásy removes his crown again. See more » Quotes Almásy : Could I have a cigarette? Hana : [laughing] Are you crazy? Almásy : Why... why are you so determined to keep me alive? Hana : Because I'm a nurse. The producer and director wish to thank The Tozeur District Governor.

See more » Connections (Den Haag) – See all my reviews as can be read in many reviews here it is a movie you love or hate - apparently not so much space for opinions in between. I for one think that is a good sign. I always appreciated this movie, although the genre is not my typical style (I never watched Titanic for instance, and am not planning to). The English Patient grips because it shows how people can be different when they are in an exotic environment as opposed when they are 'home' (Katherine), it shows how destructive love can be in a slow, strong and utterly painful way, it excites because of the extremely passionate affair, the pain of the one(s) who leave behind, how pointless one can feel to move on. The photography is just stunning, not to mention the play of the actors. The pace is slow, but timely, and that does justice to the book, the timeline, and the depth/development of the characters. To put this in 110 minutes (as some seem to suggest here) would amputate the multi-layeredness of this movie. People tend to have difficulties with the pace of movies... as if they are in a rush to get to work..

hey - get a life ! ;-) enjoy... I give this movie 4.5 out of 5. 86 of 119 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Anthony Minghella: 'The English Patient' Oscar Winner Dies Anthony Minghella: 'The English Patient' Oscar Winner Dies By Andre Soares Anthony Minghella, who won an Oscar for directing The English Patient (above, 1996), died after suffering a brain hemorrhage earlier this morning at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where he had undergone an operation for cancer of the tonsils and neck. He was 54. “It was a very hard job to get someone to give us the money for this,” Minghella told Reuters following the release of The English Patient. “It was a very unpromising document: a European film about a man haunted from his war-time past, good actors but no stars [ Ralph Fiennes , Kristin Scott Thomas , Juliette Binoche ] and a director who had little experience. “It was understandable that people (in Hollywood) had no faith in the film.

But they were all completely wrong.” Based on Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient went on to become a worldwide hit. The romantic drama earned 12 Academy Award nominations, winning 9 Oscars, including for best film, best director , best supporting actress (Juliette Binoche, in a major upset ), best cinematography (John Seale), and best original score (Gabriel Yared). Anthony Minghella was born to Italian parents on the Isle of Wight. He studied drama at the University of Hull in northeast England, and later directed stage productions. In addition to The English Patient, Minghella directed six other feature films. Among those he both directed and wrote are Truly Madly Deeply (1990), which won him a British Academy Award for best original screenplay; The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), a serviceable adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, with Matt Damon playing an ambitious gay psycho -turned-murderer; and Cold Mountain (2003), an overlong and artificial adaptation of Charles Frazier's Civil War novel.

Cold Mountain, featuring Jude Law , Renée Zellweger (who won a best supporting actress Oscar for her impersonation of Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun), and a much-too-prettified Nicole Kidman (above) ended up being an Oscar disappointment for Miramax – neither Minghella nor the film were nominated, marking the first time since 1991 that Harvey Weinstein 's studio failed to nab a best picture nod. Minghella's last feature was the psychological drama Breaking and Entering (right, 2006), starring Jude Law, Robin Wright Penn, and Juliette Binoche. The film was not a commercial success, though it had some admirers. His final directorial effort was the BBC/HBO TV movie No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, based on Alexander McCall Smith's novel set in Botswana. It is scheduled for a March 23 premiere on BBC1. Additionally, he was reportedly working on a couple of new projects. Until recently, Minghella acted as chairman of the British Film Institute and had a professional partnership with US director Sydney Pollack , who told Reuters, “Anthony was a realistic romanticist.

A kind of poet, disciplined by reality, an academic by training, a musician by nature, a compulsive reader by habit, and to most observers, a sunny soul who exuded a gentleness that should never have been mistaken for lack of tenacity and resolve.” If you liked the article Anthony Minghella: 'The English Patient' Oscar Winner Dies, please recommend it to your friends. See floating share buttons on the left. Anthony Minghella: 'The English Patient' Oscar Winner Dies © 2004–2016 Alt Film Guide and/or author(s). Text NOT to be reproduced without prior written consent. Leave a comment about 'Anthony Minghella: 'The English Patient' Oscar Winner Dies' Important: It's perfectly fine to disagree with our own and/or other commenters' views and opinions, but thoughtfulness and at least a modicum of sanity are imperative. In other words: Spammy, rude/abusive, bigoted, baseless (spreading misinformation), trollish/inflammatory, and/or just plain demented comments will be zapped and offenders may be banned. Additionally, bear in mind that a) harassment will not be tolerated b) links found in comments will generally be deleted.

Most recent comments listed on top. Stars Pay Tribute to Anthony Minghella Stars Pay Tribute to Anthony Minghella Tweet Mar 19, 2008 Hollywood stars Gwyneth Paltrow , Kevin Spacey and Ralph Fiennes have paid moving tributes to Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella , who died on Tuesday. The British filmmaker–who the won Best Director Oscar for his 1996 movie The English Patient –died from complications following surgery for cancer of the tonsils and neck, which he underwent last week at London’s Charing Cross Hospital. He was 54 years old. Paltrow , who starred in the director’s Academy Award-nominated film The Talented Mr. Ripley alongside Jude Law and Matt Damon , stated she was “shocked” by the news, calling Minghella “a wonderful man.” American Beauty star Spacey , who was a close friend of the Cold Mountain moviemaker, says, “He was one of the greats and anybody who loves storytelling will realize that he had much more to do and it’s an incredibly sad moment.

I just found out, and he was a great man and a great friend.” Brit actor Fiennes , who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his starring role in Minghella ‘s The English Patient , fondly remembers his time working on the hit film with the late director. He says, “ Anthony possessed a sensitivity and alertness to the actor’s process that very few directors have. “He directed most of The English Patient with an ankle in plaster, never losing his gentle humor and precision. “His films deal with extreme aloneness and the redemptive power of love, even at the moment of death. I will remember him as a man who always wanted to get to the heart of the matter.” COPYRIGHT 2008 WORLD ENTERTAINMENT NEWS NETWORK LTD. All Global Rights Reserved. Share 'English Patient' director Anthony Minghella dies | News | M&G 'English Patient' director Anthony Minghella dies Peter Griffiths 18 Mar 2008 18:12 British film director Anthony Minghella, who won an Oscar for The English Patient, died in a London hospital on Tuesday after a short illness, his agent said. He was 54.

Minghella died from complications following surgery last week for cancer of the tonsils and neck, agent Leslee Dart said. “The surgery had gone well and they were very optimistic,” she said. “But he developed a haemorrhage last night and they were not able to stop it.” He was married to Carolyn Choa and had two grown-up children, Max and Hannah. Film producer David Puttnam said it was a “shattering blow”. “He was a great guy, a very, very nice man, a brilliant writer, excellent director and someone who contributed more than most to our industry,” Puttnam told BBC News 24 television. “He’s going to be hugely missed.” British Film Institute director Amanda Nevill said: “We are deeply, deeply shocked and terribly sad. All our thoughts go out to his family. His art was about communicating to you and allowing you to see the world differently. He was just such a wonderful man.” Minghella won the Academy Award for best director in 1996 for the war-time romance starring Ralph Fiennes. He was also nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for the thriller The Talented Mr Ripley. He wrote the Cold Mountain screenplay.

The English Patient, based on author Michael Ondaatje’s novel, was an unexpected global hit. In an interview with Reuters after its release, Minghella said he struggled to raise the money to make the film, which won 12 Oscar nominations. “It was a very hard job to get someone to give us the money for this,” he said. “It was a very unpromising document: a European film about a man haunted from his war-time past, good actors but no stars and a director who had little experience. “It was understandable that people [in Hollywood] had no faith in the film. But they were all completely wrong.” Born to Italian parents and brought up on the Isle of Wight, he studied drama at the University of Hull in north-east England. He began his career writing scripts for theatre and television dramas before moving into feature films. In 2003, he was appointed the head of the British Film Institute, the body created to make film more accessible to the public. Two years later, he staged his first opera in London. The director and writer had been filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

It was due to be shown on the BBC on Easter Sunday and on the HBO network in the United States.—Reuters Obituary: Anthony Minghella | Film | The Guardian Movies Anthony Minghella Oscar-winning director of The English Patient who was at home in the theatre and opera as much as in films Wednesday 19 March 2008 06.06 EDT First published on Wednesday 19 March 2008 06.06 EDT Share on Messenger Close Anthony Minghella , who has died aged 54 in hospital after a haemorrhage following an operation, made an impact in various fields - as a director of theatre, television, cinema, radio and opera, as a playwright, screenwriter and producer, and as chairman of the BFI.

The talented Mr Minghella's eclectic oeuvre stretched from a short film of the three character Play (2000), as part of Channel 4's Samuel Beckett cycle, to the $83m Hollywood epic Cold Mountain (2003); from the intimate fantasy, Truly Madly Deeply (1990), made for the BBC, to the vast panorama of the Oscar-winning The English Patient (1996), financed by Miramax. Minghella, whose ample figure and cheery countenance exuded a love of life, seemed to be Harold Pinter, Orson Welles, David Lean and Richard Attenborough all rolled into one. A passionate supporter of Portsmouth football club, he was also a mixture of English restraint and Italian exuberance. Some critics stressed the adjectives in the titles of The English Patient and Cold Mountain to describe his work, while others saw his films as truly, deeply romantic. His background might explain this dichotomy. Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight, the son of ice-cream factory owners. His father was Italian/Scottish and his mother came from Leeds.

But, according to Minghella: "My maternal grandmother was a real figurehead in my life. She was a tiny peasant woman from Valvori near Monte Cassino in the south of Italy ... she'd run a cafe in the Gorbals in Glasgow so she spoke this coarse Italian/Scottish. I'd listen to her talk in a very superstitious, Catholic way about men and women and how the world worked: men are weak, women are strong; women survive, men are helpless and stupid." It was she who influenced his play A Little Like Drowning (1989), a moving and funny drama about an Italian grandmother and her English grandchildren. Before going to university, Minghella had dreams of being a pop musician, and played keyboards in a couple of bands, Earthlight and Dancer. "That was a really important part of my life. There was a rich music scene on the island at the time and, for me, writing songs developed later into writing plays. Music was a very vibrant ingredient in my life, and I originally saw my early plays as being a format for music," he explained. Minghella graduated from Hull University, where he eventually abandoned his doctoral thesis on Beckett.

"There was a time, for five years, when I read Beckett almost on a daily basis. The sense of language and poetry in his writing has been the single biggest influence on me as a writer," he declared - which may come as a surprise to those who know only his blockbusters. During the 1980s, after lecturing in drama at his alma mater, he worked in television, mainly editing scripts for Grange Hill, and writing for Jim Henson's puppet series The Storyteller: Greek Myths, and Inspector Morse. At the same time, he was writing plays, winning the London Theatre Critics award for most promising playwright in 1984, and, two years later, for best play for Made in Bangkok, an examination of the exploitation of women in Thailand by westerners. Minghella's international breakthrough came when he wrote and directed the film Truly Madly Deeply, about a bereaved woman (Juliet Stevenson) who literally wills her dead lover (Alan Rickman) back to life. This rather sentimental drama, a very English riposte to the Demi Moore vehicle Ghost, was transcended by sincere performances and some telling dialogue.

Perhaps the lure of Hollywood was so strong that Minghella agreed to direct a fluffy romantic comedy, Mr. Wonderful (1993), for which, exceptionally, he did not write the screenplay. He did not make the same mistake with The English Patient, for which he sequestered himself away from friends and family for 18 months while writing the adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel. This was followed by two years filming in Tunisia and Italy. The result, a considerable leap in scale and ambition for Minghella, was an impressive, if somewhat languorous, epic love story set during the second world war, which won nine Academy awards, including best director and best picture. Certainly Minghella showed he was able to get fine performances from his cast and control a complex structure - the plot moves between the Italian front near the end of the war, where a French-Canadian nurse (Juliette Binoche) cares for a seriously burned patient (Ralph Fiennes), and North Africa during the late 1930s, when the patient, revealed as a Hungarian count and mapmaker, fell in love with a married woman (Kristin Scott Thomas).

The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), the second film to be based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, was a sleek and intelligent thriller with Matt Damon in the title role. Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier's sombre bestselling American civil war novel, was another meticulously crafted picture in the epic mode, stunningly shot (in Romania) by cinematographer John Seale. Starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman - he as a wounded Confederate soldier who decides to desert his army at the end of the war to return home to his love - it was reminiscent of the lush historical pictures of yesteryear. Comic relief was provided by Renee Zellweger, as a hillbilly, a role that won her the best supporting actress Oscar. Returning to England and his first original screenplay since Truly Madly Deeply, Minghella was literally more at home with Breaking and Entering (2006), starring Jude Law as an architect involved in the gentrification of King's Cross. Pleasant but rather pat, the film made little impression. Minghella's last completed film, The No1 Ladies Detective Agency, written with Richard Curtis, is to be shown on BBC1 next Monday.

It has already caused controversy - unrelated to the subject or quality of the film - because it gives a rosy picture of Botswana, where it was filmed, but where hundreds of bushmen have been relocated from their ancestral lands. In 2005, Minghella, who was made a CBE in 2001, also courted controversy with his party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour party which showed Tony Blair and Gordon Brown working together lovingly. In the same year, Minghella directed Madam Butterfly, of which the Guardian's Tom Service wrote: "Anyone expecting images of cinematic brilliance from Anthony Minghella's new production of Puccini's Madam Butterfly for English National Opera will not be disappointed," although the critic went on to express mixed feelings about the production, which went on to the Metropolitan in New York, where it met with success. Minghella is survived by his wife, Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa, a son and a daughter. Robert Cooper writes: I read Anthony before I met him. It was his stage play Two Planks and a Passion which I was hoping to direct for the radio in the mid-80s.

The play was about members of one of the smaller guilds in 14th-century York who were rehearsing The Passion as their contribution to the city's Miracle Plays during a time of cutbacks in the local council's arts budget. Then news gets out that the king is coming and suddenly the dull burghers of York are hurling money at their humble plays in an orgy of self-aggrandisement. It was an extraordinary combination of razor-sharp observation of human frailty coupled with characters of genuine sincerity, complexity, warmth and charm. Meeting Anthony was the same experience. He possessed a quiet wit, an extraordinary insight into people and situations, a massive intelligence - which he never used to make you feel inadequate - and, most of all, a relaxed presence which made you feel that, somehow, you "belonged". And as you got to know him you found his genuine delight in the simple treats of life - food, friendship, conversation, music and especially family. Watching him direct his first film was a revelation. It was Truly Madly Deeply in Bristol in 1989. As soon as Anthony began, I realised he had somehow discovered how you direct.

He had not tried to learn everyone's job, he just treated people in a way that ensured they did the best work they had ever done in their life for him. And of course it was as hard as that. The pressures of film-making can reveal character in a very unforgiving way. But no matter how difficult the situation, I never saw Anthony anything other than intensely interested in and understanding of other people's artistic process. Nor was this only apparent on set. After working with the cast and crew for 12 hours, he would meet with them half an hour later to watch rushes, have dinner with them and round the evening off with a game of squash with the assistant designer - cheered on by those who had not by this time given up and gone to bed. With Anthony you simply couldn't not do your best for him. His death marks an immeasurable loss to Britain's cultural life. · Anthony Minghella, playwright and film director, born January 6 1954; died March 18 2008 · This article was amended on Wednesday March 26 2008.

Anthony Minghella was the first script editor for the TV series Grange Hill, rather than a scriptwriter as we originally said above. He was involved in devising story lines, choosing writers and editing their scripts. This has been corrected.

1997 | Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences * Sound - Walter Murch, Mark Berger, David Parker, Chris Newman Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) - Anthony Minghella Actress in a Leading Role - Kristin Scott Thomas in "The English Patient" Actor in a Leading Role - Ralph Fiennes in "The English Patient" Eraser Sound Effects Editing - Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman Ernst &amp; Lyset Short Film (Live Action) - Kim Magnusson, Anders Thomas Jensen Esposados Short Film (Live Action) - Juan Carlos Fresnadillo An Essay on Matisse Documentary (Short Subject) - Perry Wolff Evita British film director Anthony Minghella dies | Reuters Wed Mar 19, 2008 | 1:11 AM IST British film director Anthony Minghella dies British film director Anthony Minghella is seen in Los Angeles, California in this November 2, 2006 file photo. Minghella, who won an Oscar for ''The English Patient'', died in a London hospital on Tuesday after a short illness, his agent said. He was 54.

Reuters/Phil McCarten/Files By Peter Griffiths | LONDON LONDON British film director Anthony Minghella, who won an Oscar for "The English Patient", died in a London hospital on Tuesday after a short illness, his agent said. He was 54. Minghella died from complications following surgery last week for cancer of the tonsils and neck, agent Leslee Dart said. "The surgery had gone well and they were very optimistic," she said. "But he developed a haemorrhage last night and they were not able to stop it." The son of an ice-cream maker, Minghella was married to Carolyn Choa and had two grown-up children, Max and Hannah. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was a close friend of the director, said he was "deeply saddened". "He was one of Britain's greatest creative talents, one of our finest screen writers and directors, a great champion of the British film industry and an expert on literature and opera," Brown said. "He will be deeply missed." Hailed as a master film maker and admired by actors as well as fellow directors, Minghella began his cinematographic career as a television soap opera script editor in the 1980s.

Gradually working his way up the television hierarchy, Minghella turned his hand to writing, winning in 1984 the London Theatre Critics award for most promising playwright for "A Little Like Drowning". Other awards followed and in 1991 he made his breakthrough with "Truly, Madly Deeply", a film he wrote and directed for the BBC which crossed over into cinema and won a BAFTA for best screenplay. "He was a great guy, a very, very nice man, a brilliant writer, excellent director," film producer David Puttnam told BBC television, adding his death was a "shattering blow". Minghella won the Academy Award for best director in 1996 for the wartime romance "The English Patient" starring Ralph Fiennes. He was also nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for the thriller "The Talented Mr Ripley". He wrote the screenplay for "Cold Mountain". "Anthony was a realistic romanticist," said friend and colleague Sydney Pollack.

"A kind of poet, disciplined by reality, an academic by training, a musician by nature, a compulsive reader by habit, and to most observers, a sunny soul who exuded a gentleness that should never have been mistaken for lack of tenacity and resolve." "The English Patient", based on author Michael Ondaatje's novel, was an unexpected global hit. In an interview with Reuters after its release, Minghella said he had struggled to raise the money to make the film, which won 12 Oscar nominations. "It was a very hard job to get someone to give us the money for this," he said. "It was a very unpromising document: a European film about a man haunted from his war-time past, good actors but no stars and a director who had little experience. "It was understandable that people (in Hollywood) had no faith in the film. But they were all completely wrong." Born to Italian parents and brought up on the Isle of Wight, he studied drama at the University of Hull in northeast England. In 2003, he was appointed the head of the British Film Institute, the body created to make film more accessible to the public. Two years later, he staged his first opera in London.

The director and writer had been filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's novel, "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency". It was due to be shown on the BBC on Easter Sunday and on the HBO network in the United States. (Additional reporting by Katherine Baldwin and Jeremy Lovell) ADVERTISEMENT Amazon.com: The English Patient (Miramax Collector's Edition): Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Colin Firth, Julian Wadham, JÃ¼rgen Prochnow, Kevin Whately, Clive Merrison, Nino Castelnuovo, Hichem Rostom, Anthony Minghella, Alessandro von Norman, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Paul Zaentz, Saul Zaentz, Michael Ondaatje: Movies & TV Miramax Collector's Edition Unlimited Streaming with Amazon Prime Start your 30-day free trial to stream thousands of movies & TV shows included with Prime. Start your free trial Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items.

In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Page 1 of 1 Start over Sponsored Products are advertisements for products sold by merchants on Amazon.com. When you click on a Sponsored Product ad, you will be taken to an Amazon detail page where you can learn more about the product and purchase it. To learn more about Amazon Sponsored Products, click here . Ad feedback Special Offers and Product Promotions Your cost could be $0.00 instead of $3.99! Get a $50 Amazon.com Gift Card instantly upon approval for the Amazon Rewards Visa Card Apply now Editorial Reviews This powerful motion picture is an experience you will never forget. During World War II, a mysterious stranger (Ralph Fiennes) is cared for by British allies unaware of his dangerous past. Yet, as the mystery of his identity is revealed, an incredible tale of passion, intrigue, and adventure unfolds. Special Features Format: Multiple Formats, AC-3, Color, Dolby, NTSC, Widescreen Language: English Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.

) Number of discs: 2 DVD Release Date: April 26, 2011 Run Time: 162 minutes Page 1 of 1 Start over Sponsored Products are advertisements for products sold by merchants on Amazon.com. When you click on a Sponsored Product ad, you will be taken to an Amazon detail page where you can learn more about the product and purchase it. To learn more about Amazon Sponsored Products, click here . By Bobby Underwood on September 5, 2005 Format: DVD This rare and beautiful film, based on a book that is felt as much as read, transcends the medium to become art. Painted on a vast desert canvas with deep rich oils, its beauty is felt as much as seen. This film will find your heart and remain there forever. If love had a face, it would look like this. Director Anthony Minghella's screenplay shifts the center of Michael Ondaatje's story slightly in order to capture on film the essence of his beautiful prose. Ondaatje's novel is one of poetic beauty, a potrait of a rose beneath the water's surface. The film brings that beautiful rose out of the water and into the sunlight.

The book and the film are so deeply intertwined you can not watch this film without wanting to read the book, nor can you read the book without wanting to see the film. The story itself centers around three people either in love with, or haunted by ghosts they have loved and lost to war. Juliette Binoche gives an Oscar winning performance as Hana, a kind nurse with a gentle spirit but a damaged heart. She latches onto the burned and charred body of a man known only as the English patient, and ends up caring for him in a shell ravaged Italian villa in Tuscany where she feeds him plums and reads to him. When a man named Caravaggio with scars of his own arrives, the mystery of who the English patient really is begins to unfold via flashbacks. In the present, Hana begins to let her heart heal when she falls in love with a Sikh who disarms bombs left by the Germans. It is the memories of the English patient, however, which are at the heart of this film. Ralph Fiennes gives a subtle performance as the introspective Almasy, part of an international expedition mapping an unending desert with both the romance, and the danger of the sea.

Kristin Scott Thomas is wonderful as Katherine Clifton, the stunningly beautiful and enigmatic wife of a fellow mapper. An instant but unspoken attraction between she and Almasy finally becomes too unbearable to ignore and the affair that holds the key to the mystery surrounding the English patient begins. This is one of the most romantic films ever made and is filled with the joy and anguish of love and war. It shows that while war may create logistical lines that can not be crossed, the heart has no boundaries. Anyone who has ever experienced a love of such emotional intensity and physical longing that love and need became one will understand the love affair of Katherine and Almasy. Cinematographer John Seale has given this film a grace and beauty seldom seen on film. A haunting score full of mystery and romance from Gabriel Yard accompany scenes never to be forgotten, and will not be described here in case you have not yet seen them. Director Anthony Minghella explores the mystery of the desert, and the heart, which according to the "The Histories" by Herodotus, a book the English patient clings to, is an organ of fire.

If there is but one ounce of romance in your soul, you will love "The English Patient." It is a well charted and romantic map of the human heart, as wide and treacherous as the unending desert. This will be one of your favorite films once you see it. I promise. By Themis-Athena on May 15, 2004 Format: DVD After the publication of Michael Ondaatje's Booker-Prize-winning "English Patient," conventional wisdom soon held that the novel, while a masterpiece of fiction, was entirely untransferable to any other medium: too intricately layered seemed its narrative structure; too significant its protagonists' inner life; too rich its symbolism. Then along came Anthony Minghella, who reportedly read it in a single sitting and was so disoriented afterwards that he didn't even remember where he was - but who called producer Paul Zaentz the very next morning and talked him into bringing the novel to the screen.

Two major studios and several fights over the casting of key roles later, the result were an astonishing nine Oscars (Best Picture, Director - Anthony Minghella -, Supporting Actress - Juliette Binoche -, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score and Sound), as well as scores of other awards. "The English Patient" is an epic tale of love and loss; of ownership, belonging and the bars erected thereto. It unites the stories of five people: Hungarian count Laszlo de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), mistaken as English by a British Army medical unit in Italy after professing to have forgotten his identity; Hana (Juliette Binoche), Almasy's Canadian nurse; Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), his erstwhile lover; Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh sapper and Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), an ex-spy and thief.

All outsiders, they are struggling to come to terms with their lives: Almasy, on his deathbed, reflects back to his life as a North African explorer and his affair with Katherine; Hana believes herself cursed because everybody she cares for dies (in the movie her fiance and her best friend; in the novel her fiance, her father and her unborn baby), Katherine is taken to an all-male company of explorers in Cairo by her husband Geoffrey (Colin Firth), Kip, like Hana, is far away from home (the only Indian in an otherwise British and Italian environment) and Caravaggio lost his livelihood after his thumbs were cut off in captivity by the Germans, on a sadistic officer (Juergen Prochnow)'s orders. Like the novel, the movie's story largely unfolds in flashbacks: After Hana convinces her superiors to let her stay and nurse Almasy in an abandoned Tuscan villa, she and new arrival Caravaggio, who holds Almasy responsible for his fate, extract the details of his life in Africa and the truth about Katherine, Geoffrey and the events uniting him with the Cliftons and Caravaggio from Almasy in a series of conversations.

But at the same time, the story is anchored in the present by Hana's growing attachment to Kip, which shines a different light on the themes also driving Almasy and his relationship with Katherine. The film's outstanding cast, which in key roles also includes Julian Wadham as Almasy's friend Madox and Kevin Whately as Kip's sergeant Hardy carries the story marvelously: Probably their biggest award loss(besides Fiennes's and Scott Thomas's Oscar and other "best lead" nominations and Minghella's screenplay Oscar nomination) was the 1997 SAG ensemble award, which instead went to "The Birdcage." In his screenplay Minghella made several changes vis-a-vis the novel; the biggest of these doubtlessly a shift in focus from Hana, Caravaggio and Kip to Almasy and Katherine, and the fact that the film is much more explicit about Almasy's identity than the novel. Both were wise choices: Hana's inner demons in the novel are largely exactly that - *inner* demons, moreover, substantially grounded in the past and thus even more difficult to portray than Almasy's and Katherine's.

Similarly, once the focus had moved to the latter couple, Kip's back story would have extended the movie without significantly advancing it; and the same is true for the intersections between Caravaggio's path and that of Hana's father. Secondly, mistaken *national* identity is overall more central to Almasy's character than identity as such; so the novel's intricate mystery about his persona might well have proven unnecessarily distracting in the movie's context. Indeed, once Almasy had become the story's greatest focus, much of its symbolism virtually even required that there be no real doubt about his identity. But in all core respects, Minghella remained faithful to Ondaatje's novel; particularly regarding its profoundly impressionistic imagery, as shown, for example, in the curves formed by the Northern African desert's endless sand dunes, which in John Seale's magnificent and justly awardwinning cinematography resemble those of a woman's body as much as they do in Ondaatje's language, thus uniting Almasy's two greatest loves in a single symbol.

Doubtlessly the most important image is that of maps: Guides to unknown places like those drawn by Almasy and his friends during their explorations, but also tools of ownership like the cartography of Northern Africa made possible by Geoffrey Clifton's photos, and ultimately symbols of betrayal, as Almasy surrenders his maps to the Germans in exchange for a plane after he feels deserted by the British. And while Kip, who spends all day searching for bombs but wants to be found at night, guides Hana to himself by a series of tiny signposts in the form of oil lamps - but still never tries to expect her, in order not to get too much attached to her - Almasy, the perpetual loner who declares that he hates ownership more than anything else, gets so attached to Katherine that he claims her suprasternal notch as his exclusive property and later refers to her as his wife, which due to her marriage to Geoffrey she couldn't truly be in life and could only symbolically become in death.

- The final word on maps, belonging and ownership, however, is part of Katherine's legacy to Almasy (and I still prefer the novel's language here): "I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps." Also recommended: By J. Blilie on February 2, 2005 Format: DVD|Verified Purchase I love this movie. In fact, it was the first movie I ever purchased (VHS) many moons ago. I first saw it in a theater with a hard-bitten financial-analyst friend of mine (male, straight). I'm an engineer (male, straight). We are not weepy types. We were both moved very much by this movie. I don't agree at all that this is a chick-flick. This is a movie aimed at adults. If you want: constant action, simplistic plot, black-and-white relationships, car crashes, shoot outs (OK, it does have some crashes and shooting), then you probably want to look elsewhere.

Casablanca, to which this movie has been contrasted, (though a good movie) could fall into the category of propaganda: produced during WWII, everyone conformed to the main line. Real people had real lives going on during WWII. I find that the negative reviews of this movie fall into two categories: 1) those who are (terribly) morally offended by extra-marital affairs, and 2) those that can't follow a complex plot and set of characters. If you can see beyond those issues, and you like a good, complex tragedy, you should enjoy this movie. This is a wonderful movie. The cinematography is gorgeous, music is fantastic, story is complex and compelling, the characters diverse and engaging. Everyone I know liked this movie a lot. Two love stories, plenty of tragedy and twists. Great actors and acting. The story is revealed slowly through flashbacks, it's a great dramatic device and works very well. I am a voracious reader and I have read the book as well: I prefer the movie (I can only say this about one other novel/movie: Dr. Zhivago). Like I said, everyone I know liked it very much. Enjoy.

Question: Which film with Ralph Fiennes won Anthony Minghella an Oscar?
Answer: The English Patient