After the Oscar-winning The English Patient, writer/director Anthony Minghella attempted another tricky literary adaptation with The Talented Mr. Ripley, which features heartthrob Matt Damon cast against type as a psychopathic bisexual murderer. Tom Ripley (Damon) is a bright and charismatic sociopath who makes his way in mid-'50s New York City as a men's room attendant and sometimes pianist, though his real skill is in impersonating other people, forging handwriting, and running second-rate scams. After being mistaken for a Princeton student, Tom meets the shipping tycoon father of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), who has traveled to the coast of Italy, where he's living a carefree life with his father's money and his beautiful girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). Dickie's father will pay Ripley 1,000 dollars plus his expenses if he can persuade Dickie to return to America. As Ripley and Dickie become friends, Tom finds himself both attracted to Dickie and envious of his life of pleasure. In time, he decides that he would rather be Dickie Greenleaf than Tom Ripley, so rather than go back to his life of poverty, Ripley impulsively murders Dickie and assumes his identity. The Talented Mr. Ripley was based on the first of a series of novels featuring Tom Ripley written by Patricia Highsmith; the story was previously filmed in 1960 as Purple Noon, with Alain Delon as Ripley

Baz Luhrmann directs this sweeping historical epic set in northern Australia. Nicole Kidman stars as Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat who inherits a vast cattle ranch in the unforgiving Australian outback. When her land comes under threat from a takeover plot by English cattle barons, Sarah reluctantly teams up with a rough-edged drover (Hugh Jackman) to drive her 2,000 head of cattle hundreds of miles over some of the world's most desolate landscape. The pair then arrive in Darwin just in time to face the Japanese bombings that come only months after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.