For those who have forgotten the depth of romance and passion that the movies are capable of conveying, Anthony Minghella‘s The English Patient can remedy the situation. This is one of the year‘s most unabashed and powerful love stories, using flawless performances, intelligent dialogue, crisp camera work, and loaded glances to attain a level of eroticism and emotional connection that many similar films miss.

　　Is The English Patient melodramatic? Of course, but it‘s the sort of finely-honed melodrama that embraces viewers rather than smothering them. And the movie never resorts to cheap, manipulative tactics. This well-crafted story, brought to the screen with great care by British playwright and director Anthony Minghella (Truly, Madly, Deeply) and based on the prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje, serves up the love of Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) and Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas) in a way that is simultaneously epic and intimate.

　　The English Patient has an elliptical structure, beginning with the same scene that it ends with. In between, it moves several years into the future, and even further into the past. The opening sequence, which takes place during World War II, shows a British plane being shot down over the North African desert. The pilot, a Hungarian count named Laszlo Almasy, is badly burned in the ensuing crash. Years later, in 1944 Italy, we meet him again. Although his outward injuries have healed, leaving his features scarred beyond recognition, he is dying. He has also supposedly lost his memory. Hana (Juliette Binoche), the Canadian nurse who cares for him, takes him to an isolated, abandoned church to allow him to die in peace. There, injecting him with morphine and reading to him from his beloved volume of Herodotus, Hana seeks to seeks to stimulate his memories. Meanwhile, others arrive at the church -- a mysterious, crippled war veteran named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), who has a hidden agenda, and a pair of bomb experts, the British Sgt. Hardy