"A Room with a View" is one of the best-known Merchant-Ivory films, the one that made their reputation for tastefully adapting Edwardian novels. Working from E. M. Forster's charming story, Merchant and Ivory add gorgeous Tuscan cinematography, lush opera music, and a cast of talented British actors. Even a skinny-dipping scene is done with enough class that the movie got away with a PG rating (though that probably wouldn't happen nowadays!). In short, Merchant-Ivory makes it look easy—and this ease has led to charges of their films being dull and middlebrow, as well as to many imitators.

But this stereotype of "a Merchant-Ivory film" fails to mention just how vivid and hilarious "A Room with a View" actually is. With scene-stealing actors like Maggie Smith as a prim, passive-aggressive chaperone and Daniel Day-Lewis as a self-centered young man whose every gesture tells of his fastidious rigidity, a rich vein of humor runs through the film. The movie also delights in putting its heroine Lucy (a baby-faced Helena Bonham Carter) in situations that prove awkward, funny, and ultimately invigorating for a well-bred young lady of 1905. Lucy finds herself in a love triangle, with society telling her to choose Cecil (Day- Lewis) but a deeper force pulling her toward the unconventional, moody George Emerson (Julian Sands).

A comedy of manners, "A Room with a View" is sometimes guilty of seeing its characters as types, rather than people. Even Lucy is not much more than "the young girl transfigured by Italy" that Miss Lavish (Judi Dench), a writer of cheap novels, labels her as. Still, it's easy to get caught up in the romance of this delightful movie. After seeing it, you'll want to go out and defend Truth and Love from all those who would deny them. Or at least to start saving up for a trip to Italy.

No disrespect to the achingly elegant prose of E.M. Forster, but the last chapter of his novel simply cannot compare to this film's last shot, of a pair of lovers in a pensione in Florence, finally with their view of the Arno. As for the rest of this brilliant adaptation, it is populated with actors so perfectly cast it's as if they'd been invented for the roles-- Julian Sands as the Edwardian bohemian George Emerson, Helena Bonham-Carter, radiant as Lucy Honeychurch, Denholm Elliott, once again stealing every scene he's in, and Daniel Day-Lewis as the priggish Cecil Vyse, in a performance so self-consciously stiff he looks as though he were taken off the cover of the New Yorker. It's romantic, funny, stylish and impassioned. I first saw this film when it was released, and even at a young age, I knew I'd fallen in love. Twenty years later, I'm still in love with it.

This movie made me go to Florence, Italy. And once I got there, they actually showed it every other night at the pensione I stayed in. Though set in Victorian times, it is reminiscent of a Jane Austen novel- romantic and humorous, but more passionate. Characters are lovingly made fun of. The acting is wonderful. People you've seen elsewhere, but in unusual roles. Helena Bonham Carter is the confused heroine, Maggie Smith plays her passive-aggressive aunt, you won't believe it's Daniel Day-Lewis playing the most irritating pompous man, Judi Dench is a gossipy romance novelist, Julian Sands is adorably weird, and the supporting characters are also wonderful. It's one of favorites.