Reception
The film garnered widespread critical acclaim and was a major award winner as well as a box office success; its awards included the Academy Award for Best Picture, the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama and the BAFTA Award for Best Film. Juliette Binoche won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, winning out over Lauren Bacall for The Mirror Has Two Faces (it would have been Bacall's only Oscar win, and in her acceptance speech Binoche commented that she had expected Bacall to win). Anthony Minghella took home the Oscar for Best Director. Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes were nominated for Best Actress and Best Actor. Overall, The English Patient was nominated for 12 awards and ultimately walked away with 9. Its presence at the Oscars was so large that upon winning Best Original Song for Evita, Andrew Lloyd Webber joked "Thank goodness there wasn't a song in The English Patient." It is the highest-grossing non-IMAX film (and second highest-grossing film overall) to never reach the weekend box office top 5.
The English Patient is one of only three Best Picture winners (Amadeus and The Hurt Locker being the other two) to never enter the weekend box office top 5 since top 10 rankings were first recorded in 1982.
Chicago Sun Times critic Roger Ebert gave the movie a 4/4 rating, saying "it's the kind of movie you can see twice – first for the questions, the second time for the answers."
The film has a "Certified Fresh" rating of 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and consensus stating "Though it suffers from excessive length and ambition, director Minghella's adaptation of the Michael Ondaatje novel is complex, powerful, and moving." The film also has a rating of 87% on Metacritic, indicating "universal acclaim".
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)