I wasn't the only one taken aback when director Anthony Minghella died earlier this month at the age of 54. He had only directed six feature films, including The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, but he made his biggest splash with 1996's The English Patient, which garnered nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (and had three other nominations besides). Adapted by Minghella from the novel by Michael Ondaatje, the film stars Ralph Fiennes as a Hungarian count and explorer whose plane is shot down in the North African desert during World War II and who is burned beyond recognition. Jumping forward to the end of the war, we find him in Italy, suffering from amnesia and being cared for by nurse Juliette Binoche. She believes she's cursed because everyone she loves or gets close to dies, but this is no problem with Fiennes since he's close to death anyway.

Wishing to spare Fiennes the pain of being moved, Binoche sets him up at an abandoned monastery, which also becomes home to Willem Dafoe, a morphine addict who claims to be working for the Allies rooting out traitors, and base camp for Naveen Andrews, a Sikh bomb expert that Binoche finds herself drawn to despite her misgivings about getting involved with anyone. As for Fiennes's murky past, Minghella slowly reveals that it has to do with an affair he had with Kristin Scott Thomas, whose husband Colin Firth was a pilot working for the British government in the lead-up to war. Unsurprisingly, Firth was less than pleased to discover his wife's infidelity, which ultimately leads to tragedy for all three of them (four if you count Dafoe, whose life was also affected by Fiennes's actions). It's the kind of film Academy voters go gaga for, but I would have much preferred seeing Best Picture go to Fargo that year.

In 1960, Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was made into a film by French director René Clément and retitled Purple Noon. The film was a huge success and made an instant star out of Alain Delon. Four decades later, director Anthony Minghella adapted the novel afresh, not only restoring its original title, but also exploring certain areas -- like Ripley's latent homosexuality -- that were simply too taboo when the earlier film was made.

Matt Damon stars as Ripley, whose talents (which include playing the piano in addition to forgery and impersonating other people) aren't exactly setting the world on fire when he takes advantage of a rich shipping magnate's offer to send him to Italy to coax the man's wayward son Dickie (Jude Law) into returning home to New York. When he gets to the village where Dickie is staying, though, Ripley becomes enamored of both his lifestyle and his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) and quickly ingratiates himself into their lives. When the notoriously fickle Dickie tries to break things off with him, though, Ripley takes drastic measures and assumes his identity to ensure his continued comfort.

Complicating matters are socialite Meredith (Cate Blanchett), who already thinks Ripley is Dickie since that's how he first introduced himself to her, and playboy Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who sees through his charade, but things really come to a head when Dickie's father (James Rebhorn) arrives with a no-nonsense private detective (Philip Baker Hall) in tow. (This is on top of having the Italian police constantly breathing down his neck.) In the end, Clément wasn't allowed to let his protagonist get away scot-free, but Minghella makes it clear that while his Ripley may not get caught by the authorities, he's still going to be punished for his transgressions.