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Netflix’s Ripley haunts a beloved movie like a shadow
Just because a movie is iconic and beloved doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be remade, particularly if it was itself based on another work in the first place. That’s as true of the 1999 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley as it would be of anything else. Anthony Minghella took sweeping liberties in his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 crime novel — itself a genre-defining classic — about a young conman who first infiltrates and then cannibalizes the life of a rich American playboy whiling away a carefree existence on the Italian coast. There’s room for another take to access different parts of Highsmith’s book than Minghella did, especially in the more expansive medium of an eight-part miniseries.