Oscar and Lucinda

Directed by Gillian Armstrong, this film adapts Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning 1988 novel. Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes), a misfit raised under an abusive evangelical father, becomes an Anglican minister and develops what amounts to a divine obsession with gambling, treating risk and chance as extensions of his faith. Lucinda Leplastrier, played by Cate Blanchett, is a wealthy, independent Australian heiress who owns a glass factory and has come to London to buy materials for it. The two meet aboard a ship bound for Australia and develop a mutual obsession built around their shared love of wagering. The film's most striking image has Oscar hauling a prefabricated glass church across harsh Australian terrain toward a remote Aboriginal settlement, folding his religion and her glasswork into a single object. The adaptation cuts roughly three hundred pages of setup from the novel's first half and lands on a notably brighter ending than the book. It drew one Academy Award nomination, for Best Costume Design, and performed modestly at the box office, but stands as Cate Blanchett's first major leading role, the step immediately before her international breakthrough in Elizabeth a year later. Who it's for: Fans of period literary adaptations and anyone tracing Cate Blanchett's early career. Who it's not for: Not for readers attached to the novel's bleak ending, since the film noticeably softens it.