The English Patient (1996)

IMDb plot summary: 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.
Directed by Anthony Minghella. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Defoe, and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Good grief, this is boring, and beyond that, the writing and acting just all seems... off. There's a sense of intense melodrama that keeps me at a distance and never lets me feel like I can buy into the characters. The music swells and the characters laugh and cry, but very little of that feels earned and I cannot for the life of me figure out how this won so many awards because it seems so shoddily made.

There are a few things that do stand out as positives. The scene at the end where he returns to the cave is nicely tragic, the bomb-defusing scene is wonderfully tense, and the cinematography is gorgeous. Some of those desert landscape shots would no doubt have been even more stunning on the big screen. But these few isolated moments out of a 2 hour 40 minute movie did not make up for the rest of it. I'm afraid I have to side with Elaine Benes on this one.

2 stars.

How it entered my Flickchart:
The English Patient < Happythankyoumoreplease
The English Patient > Taxi
The English Patient < Mickey's Christmas Carol
The English Patient < Treasures of the Snow
The English Patient < JFK
The English Patient > 2046
The English Patient > Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
The English Patient > The Misfits
The English Patient > Waltz with Bashir
The English Patient > Drive Me Crazy
The English Patient > Jumper
Final spot: #1745 out of 2426.