A Room With A View (1986)

A young English girl (Helena Bonham Carter) visits Italy along with her chaperoning cousin (Maggie Smith). It is there she meets an impetuous free spirit (Julian Sands) with whom she has an attraction. But upon returning to England, she gets engaged to a pompous stuffed shirt (Daniel Day Lewis) but not long after, the free spirit and his father (Denholm Elliott) move into her village. Based on the E.M. Forster novel, this is the crown jewel of the Merchant/Ivory catalog. Everything falls into place: the acting, the writing (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who won an Oscar for her screenplay), the cinematography (Tony Pierce Roberts), the music (Richard Robbins) and praise be to director James Ivory for piecing it all together. It's romantic without being all soppy about it and sophisticated without being pretentious. It's lost none of its charm in the almost thirty years since its release and is the kind of film that word "timeless" seems to be apt. With Judi Dench, Simon Callow, Rupert Graves, Fabia Drake and Rosemary Leach.