The English Patient (1996)

Two timelines, one obsession. In the late 1930s, the Hungarian mapmaker Almásy charts the Sahara and falls for Katharine Clifton, the wife of a man flying for his expedition; as World War II ends, a badly burned patient in an Italian monastery is nursed by Juliette Binoche's Hana while that story surfaces in pieces. Anthony Minghella cuts between the two so that the past keeps arriving as memory, which is exactly how a long love feels from the far end of it. Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas play the affair as something closer to a fever than a flirtation, and the desert photography makes the scale literal. At over two and a half hours it asks for patience, and it repays it with one of the most devastating final acts in any romance.