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100It's an horrific and tragic story, but somehow made beautiful through the care and attention of Schnabel's direction and Bardem's tender, unforgettable performance.
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100It's huge and bewildering and it hurts to watch, but it hurts so good it's gorgeous.
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100Arenas' life zigzags before us in a manner as heady and unpredictable as it must have felt to the man who lived it.
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100In uniting to honor Arenas, Bardem and Schnabel create something extraordinary.
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100With Before Night Falls, Schnabel has moved to an entirely new plane of cinematic achievement.
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100This powerful, lyrical meditation on Arenas's life achieves a kind of hallucinatory urgency as it leaps and twists through his life.
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90The film's ephemeral, semi-evasive lyricism ultimately works as a modest frame for Bardem's tender, deft portrait, which is in turn suitably expansive and rooted in the most concrete details -- Arenas's pride and anger, his unsentimental wit and defiant vitality.
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90A dense, emotionally satisfying portrait of a man, a time and a place.
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88There is a little something of the spoiled masochist about Arenas. One would not say he seeks misery, but he wears it like a badge of honor, and we can see his mistakes approaching before he does. This is not a weakness in the film but one of its intriguing strengths
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88This is an art film in the true sense of the term, engaging the mind, senses and emotions in a way that only movies at their best can do.
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88A dreamy, passionate ode to freedom -- of thought, of expression, of every person's innate right to simply be.
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88This is a sad, passionate, beautifully wrought story, and Bardem's portrait of Arenas is at once daring and deeply moving.
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88Most of all it's the emotional and spiritual arc of an exile, in all its terrible isolation, that gives ''Before Night Falls'' its power.
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88A thoughtful, bittersweet film biography of the Cuban writer that captures both his irrepressible spirit and his sometimes overwhelming melancholy.
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80It's such a sensory experience; in its best moments, the film washes over you like a fever dream.
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80Bardem's performance is simply shattering.
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80As good as it is, Before Night Falls might not work if Schnabel hadn't found a leading man to hold it together and the Spanish actor Javier Bardem has the understated charisma to pull it off.
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Arenas' story is a downer that doesn't produce despair. That's because of the exceptional bravery of Arenas himself, and the understanding that both Schnabel and his extraordinary leading man, Javier Bardem, have of him, his world, and his time.
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80Anchored by a charismatic and accessible performance by Javier Bardem as star-crossed Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, this florid examination of an artist's coming of age, of cultures in collusion and conflict, is difficult to resist.
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80Like a deathbed dream it leapfrogs through Arenas's life, reconstructing crucial moments as a succession of bright, feverish illuminations.
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75Politics and humanism find an engrossing balance in this ambitious drama based on the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban poet who was persecuted by the homophobic Castro regime.
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75A personal eulogy, from one artist to another, and an indictment of all systems of government that deny people the right to free expression and the full realization of their talent.
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75Plays like a labor of love.
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70An impressive piece of filmmaking, with lively and suggestive depictions of pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba (shot in Mexico).
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63Anyone expecting a hard-hitting biography will be disappointed by Julian Schnabel's soft-edged, dreamy and relatively nonpolitical film.
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58Under Schnabel's direction, it becomes stilted and static, if not simplistic.
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Positive: 7 out of 8
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Mixed: 1 out of 8
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Negative: 0 out of 8