Director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella’s rendering of the 1955 Patricia Highsmith novel is at once a thoughtful character study, a faithful period piece, a subtle cautionary tale, a paean to the beauty of Italy, and an entertaining thriller. Mr. Minghella usually spends three to four years working on a film; The Talented Mr. Ripley feels like a life’s work.

I truly wanted to like this movie as The Accidental Tourist is one of those “little stories” – ordinary people struggling with the acceptance of a universal truth or wrestling with a great dilemma – that I am always drawn to. Unfortunately, the struggle here is so protracted that it becomes tedious, giving rise to my own struggle to keep my focus all the way to the final scenes.

Director Michael Radford has given us a beautiful version of Shakespeare’s Merchant. Employing all the advantages of cinematic art, location filming, and technology, he offers up a stunning period piece in which practically every scene resembles a painting.

I recall seeing this film at the Bay Theatre in the West End of Vancouver when it came out in 1984 and being horrified by the portrayal of Mozart as a buffoon; all my illusions about this towering figure of classical music were shaken in those first few scenes of the movie.

This is one of those rare films that marries form and content and execution so perfectly that there is a stunned silence at the end of it, a silence that in a concert hall would be followed by an extended standing ovation. There are no tricks here, no special effects, no shocking twists of plot; there is only cinematic storytelling and acting at their very finest.