Ripley's Game (2002)

You can easily imagine this is Matt Damon's Tom Ripley grown up and comfortable in his sociopathic skin, no longer scared of what he can't control, now living in Italy with his wife and surrounding himself with frescoes, antiques, harpsichords, Baroque music and art and eating soufflés and truffles and still manipulating the people around him to achieve his own goals which, in this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's third book in the Ripley series, is simply to avenge a neighbour's slight at a party - the high body count, the trips back and forth across Europe, a siege with Balkan gangsters, are all just part of that sociopathic game of revenge that fills time while really we watch this wonderful thriller to see if John Malkovich's Tom Ripley will make it to his wife's harpsichord concert or not.

★★★★☆

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Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) (1960)

Despite one major and several minor deviations from the source material that will nag at devotees of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, this is a top-class French thriller with a more sociopathic, more conniving version of the impulsive Tom Ripley of the book and Anthony Minghella movie, but he is still exceeding lucky as he narrowly avoids detection in a murder investigation conducted across the exquisitely, luxuriously photographed sun-bleached coastal regions of Italy.

★★★★★

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A Kind of Murder (2016)

This movie, based on Patricia Highsmith's The Blunderer, about Walter Stackhouse, an author whose suffering in an unhappy marriage is alleviated when his wife is found dead under a bridge, has all the trappings of a good noir thriller but becomes less and less rewarding and more and more nebulous as it goes on.

★★☆☆☆

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The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

Despite the anticlimax of its fudged final scene, this is a terrific adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 book that succeeds as a classy thriller, a glamorous European travelogue, and a deeply disturbing psychological character study of a young chameleon whose talents as a voice artist and tendency to be in the right place at the right time assist him in keeping up a series of wickedly simple but deadly deceptions.

★★★★☆

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The American Friend (Der Amerikanische Freund) (1977)

Wim Wender's take on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley is to have Dennis Hopper saunter around Hamburg in overalls, a cowboy hat and a Willy Wonka haircut, but if you can get past this incongruity and accept Dennis Hopper's sharp edges and surface madness in place of the literary Ripley's sophisticated sociopathy, there is lots to enjoy about this story of a sick man coerced into a series of murders and who ends up with a strange new friend and abettor.

★★★☆☆

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Strangers On A Train (1951)

Based on Patricia Highsmith's first novel, this Hitchcock masterpiece is notable not just for its stand-out inventive scenes (the out-of-control merry-go-round, the murder reflected in a dropped pair of glasses, the staring face among tennis spectators) but also for its unnerving portrait of delusion - Robert Walker plays the oddball who embroils a tennis star into a warped murder scheme.

★★★★★

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Carol (2015)

Patricia Highsmith fans will be more interested than most in this inoffensive, rather pretty but pretty boring drama about two women in New York who embark on a romance at a time when such things were frowned upon.

★★☆☆☆

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The Two Faces of January (2014)

This hugely enjoyable, old school suspense drama about a tour guide in Greece who becomes embroiled in the lives of an American couple, is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith and as is her wont, centres on the power struggle and criminality of the two men as the trio traverse beautiful Greek and Turkish locations.

★★★★☆

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