The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco's 1980 novel sold in the millions while being, by design, a semiotics lecture with a body count, and the film rights were considered unfilmable for most of that decade. Jean-Jacques Annaud spent four years on the adaptation and built the abbey outside Rome — the largest exterior set constructed in Europe since the war — for a French-Italian-West German production that came in at $17.5 million and took $77 million back.

Sean Connery plays William of Baskerville, the Franciscan whose habit of reasoning from evidence marks him as suspect in a house that regards curiosity as a sin; Christian Slater, sixteen at the time, is the novice Adso, and F. Murray Abraham arrives as the inquisitor Bernardo Gui. Tonino Delli Colli shot it in the cold available light of a real winter, and Annaud cast faces rather than actors for the monks, which gives the abbey its unnerving Brueghel quality.

Reviews in 1986 were mixed — Ebert thought the setup better than the film, others found it slow — and it has aged into something its reception did not predict: at 7.7 on IMDb from 128,000 votes and 3.7 on Letterboxd from 116,000, it is one of the most durable European literary adaptations of its era. Connery took the BAFTA for it, and the César went to the film as Best Foreign Film. A 2019 television version with John Turturro exists; this remains the one people mean.