It would be hard to top Fred Schepisi's Roxanne as the #1 film adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s nasally enhanced romance, but the latest from Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist) comes close. Time and again Peter Dinklage has proven to be more than just another Billy Barty, a character actor accepting any role that requires its performer to be under 4′ 5″. Reimagined as a character who’s as diminutive as the original Cyrano’s nose was protruding, it’s a role Dinklage was born to play. Cyrano suffers from a severe inferiority complex whenever he’s around Roxanne. Surely a man capable of conquering 10 men with a sword can win the heart of one woman. Unlike those around him, Dinklage’s libertine is scruffy and unpowdered. In a performance that is so powerfully seductive, Dinklage didn’t even bother to attempt an accent. The score is lovely — leading lady Haley Bennett can actually sing — and cameraman Seamus McGarvey’s color scheme and Sarah Greenwood’s production design are as pink and bountiful as Roxanne's bosom. There are a couple of songs too many and it’s doubtful that anyone in 17th Century France would ask what “God has been smoking.” Still, in this day and age, a romantic fantasy for adults, shorn of spaceships and costumed heroes, is a picture worth treasuring. (2021) — Scott Marks