Inevitably recalling Lawrence of Arabia with its desert setting and epic sweep, this skilful adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's difficult novel is at heart two love stories, one in the present, the other told in flashback. Ralph Fiennes plays the hideously burned "English patient" tended to by Juliette Binoche's nurse in an Italian monastery at the end of the Second World War. His story, torrid and dangerous, is pieced together gradually, while Binoche falls in love with a bomb disposal officer (Naveen Andrews). Fiennes is in fact a Hungarian, a mapmaker charting the Sahara who got caught up in the war and in an affair with the unhappily married Kristin Scott Thomas. It's an ambitious film and director Anthony Minghella's skill lies equally in his screenplay, which delivers explanation only in fragments but keeps us involved for what is an epic running time.

In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.