Before Night Falls

Newsweek David Ansen

This powerful, lyrical meditation on Arenas's life achieves a kind of hallucinatory urgency as it leaps and twists through his life.

Film.com Peter Brunette

With Before Night Falls, Schnabel has moved to an entirely new plane of cinematic achievement.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

It's huge and bewildering and it hurts to watch, but it hurts so good it's gorgeous.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

In uniting to honor Arenas, Bardem and Schnabel create something extraordinary.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Arenas' life zigzags before us in a manner as heady and unpredictable as it must have felt to the man who lived it.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

It'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.

Variety David Rooney

A dense, emotionally satisfying portrait of a man, a time and a place.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

The 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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

This is a sad, passionate, beautifully wrought story, and Bardem's portrait of Arenas is at once daring and deeply moving.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Most of all it's the emotional and spiritual arc of an exile, in all its terrible isolation, that gives ''Before Night Falls'' its power.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

A dreamy, passionate ode to freedom -- of thought, of expression, of every person's innate right to simply be.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

A thoughtful, bittersweet film biography of the Cuban writer that captures both his irrepressible spirit and his sometimes overwhelming melancholy.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

There 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

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

This 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.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Bardem's performance is simply shattering.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

It's such a sensory experience; in its best moments, the film washes over you like a fever dream.

Dallas Observer David Ehrenstein

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.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

As 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.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Anchored 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.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Like a deathbed dream it leapfrogs through Arenas's life, reconstructing crucial moments as a succession of bright, feverish illuminations.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Politics 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.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A 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.

USA Today Mike Clark

Plays like a labor of love.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

An impressive piece of filmmaking, with lively and suggestive depictions of pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba (shot in Mexico).

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Anyone expecting a hard-hitting biography will be disappointed by Julian Schnabel's soft-edged, dreamy and relatively nonpolitical film.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Under Schnabel's direction, it becomes stilted and static, if not simplistic.