“The English Patient” is a period romance both sincere and detached. This combination doesn’t fully work, even as everyone involved is doing some spectacular work in bringing a lopsided script to life.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Feb 13, 2025

... a 'Casablanca' for the 90s, directed with sweep, elegance, and grand passions by Anthony Minghella from his screenplay adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel.

| Nov 18, 2023

...from sweeping vistas, incredible performances, and one incredible score, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient is one of the most beautiful films...

| Jun 14, 2023

The rich complexity of Minghella's approach finds an incomparable balance between classical storytelling and a modern formal treatment, and therein realizes one of the most enduring, beloved, and unique romances ever to come out of Hollywood.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 21, 2022

Much like the patient's memories, The English Patient swirls around in your head, refusing to recede, its images lingering like snatches of a fragrance too sweet to be forgotten.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 17, 2021

Epically romantic stuff, with a welcome dose of modernism mixed up in an intriguing mystery.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Sep 11, 2020

If Minghella's debut feature Truly, Madly, Deeply was overrated -- a Ghost for the NW3 set -- this movie is a quantum leap towards cinema's potential for magic.

| Feb 4, 2020

You can take your brain to The English Patient and you will not be insulted. Your eyes will not be offended either. This scarcely makes Minghella's film the best in the world; it just makes it loom large.

| Feb 4, 2020

Whenever the movie's design seems too elaborate, too remote, it's the rare detail of these performances that redeems it.

| Feb 21, 2019

Minghella doesn't so much adapt the novel as he translates it wondrously to a different medium, with its mysteries and passions intact.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 21, 2019

...a deliberate, lengthy but always fascinating film...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 21, 2019

Its performances are finely crafted with loving care.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2019

This is a radical adaptation which transposes, re-assembles and deletes key elements of the novel to achieve a pure cinematic reinvent ion that is admirably adroit - and as distinctive a work of art as the book remains in its own right.

| Feb 19, 2019

Its wit, sophistication and artistry never are at odds with the fundamental pull of a powerful love story that out-Zhivagos Doctor Zhivago because it respects love's mysteries, admits it doesn't know the heart's boundaries.

| Apr 27, 2018

...a beautiful film. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Mar 2, 2018

Relentlessly beautiful, but not quite stupifyingly so

| Mar 1, 2018

Probably untranslatable to the screen. The English Patient is a noble try. But still a bore.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 1, 2018

It is, after all, quite a lot of movie, two hours and 42 minutes' worth, and the more movie you have, the greater the chances that not all of it will work equally well.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 4, 2015

It took a filmmaker with Anthony Minghella's vision to even attempt an adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. And it took a filmmaker with Minghella's talent to pull it off.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 22, 2015

Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts -- and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too.

| Feb 22, 2015