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Actor · Voice actor · 1962

Ralph Fiennes

7: briefs
13:00: average
91 min: in total

On film.briefs7

The English Patient

Anthony Minghella · 1996

Anthony Minghella’s 1996 adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel follows a severely burned man in postwar Italy whose fragmented memories reveal a pre-war love affair in the Sahara. Built on Walter Murch’s groundbreaking editing, John Seale’s restrained cinematography, and Gabriel Yared’s evocative score, it explores desire, guilt and the collapse of imperial certainties across three interwoven timelines. Though criticised for its length and narrative opacity, its formal unity and emotional precision have secured its place as a defining romance-war hybrid of the 1990s.

Hail, Caesar!

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen · 2016

Hail, Caesar! (2016) is a Coen brothers comedy set in 1951 Hollywood, following studio fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) as he manages crises across five concurrent film productions. Shot on film by Roger Deakins and costumed with meticulous period detail, it treats the studio system as a functioning bureaucracy — not a golden age to mourn, but a machine to map. Its strength lies in structural fidelity, not character depth.

Strange Days

Kathryn Bigelow · 1995

Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 science fiction thriller, set in a gritty, near-future Los Angeles, follows a black-market dealer of recorded memories (SQUID) who uncovers a conspiracy tied to police violence, racial injustice, and sexual assault. Anchored by Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett, it merges noir structure with dystopian texture, using immersive point-of-view sequences and a brooding electronic score to explore surveillance, memory, and power. Though a box-office failure, its formal rigour and thematic prescience have earned it enduring critical reassessment.

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow · 2008

Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 war thriller follows a U.S. Army bomb disposal team in Iraq, using procedural fidelity and sensory intensity to convey the physical and psychological toll of sustained combat. Written by Mark Boal from embedded experience, it prioritises immediacy over explanation, with Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography and Chris Innis’s editing sustaining relentless, close-quarters tension. Though acclaimed for its craft and awarded six Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, its narrow focus has drawn criticism from veterans for omitting political and cultural dimensions of the conflict.

Kubo and the Two Strings

Travis Knight · 2016

In a fictionalised feudal Japan, a one-eyed boy named Kubo earns a living by animating paper figures with music, until his grandfather's ghostly aunts arrive to finish what took his eye in infancy. Travis Knight's directorial debut for Laika pairs handmade stop-motion craft, inspired by ukiyo-e woodblock printing, with a quest plot that leans harder on grief and loss than most animated adventures aimed at children.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson · 2014

Ralph Fiennes plays a meticulous concierge framed for murder in Wes Anderson's 2014 comedy, built from Stefan Zweig's writing and won on the strength of its production design and score.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Nick Park, Steve Box · 2005

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit expands the stop-motion duo into a monster-movie parody, following the pair's pest-control business as a mysterious Were-Rabbit starts terrorizing a town's giant-vegetable competition. Directed by Nick Park and Steve Box for Aardman and DreamWorks Animation on a $30 million budget, it grossed $194 million and became the first stop-motion film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.