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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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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