The Talented Mr. Ripley

Director: Anthony Minghella

1999 / 139min / 35mm

There’s a glowering darkness at the heart of Minghella’s sun-kissed, classically polished continental thriller, working from the same source material as Purple Noon (1960), but bringing the homoerotic subtext to the point of just plain being “text.” Here, Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley lucks into a passport to the high life (and unrequited love) with epicurean rich kid Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), though Dickie’s Ugly American pal Philip Seymour Hoffman smells something funny… Walter Murch’s second teaming with Minghella, following The English Patient, which, in its hewing closely to the necessarily limited perspective of the Ripley character, recalls Murch’s previous work on Coppola’s The Conversation.

Distributor: Paramount