Review of Before Night Falls (2000) by Nate W — 24 Jul 2010
Julian Schnabel's "Before Night Falls" sits somewhere in between the conventional biopic and a slice-of-life movie. It presents slices of the life of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas (wonderfully embodied by Javier Bardem) in fragmented chronology, rather than streamlining his biography into a standard cinematic narrative.
This gives the film a sort of realism that one comes to appreciate, but it also kills any sort of fluency the story may have had, sometimes testing its audience's patience. It also makes it hard for us to explore Arenas as anything beyond a man who things happen to, rather than an artist with complex thoughts and feelings.
However disjointed they feel as a whole, the individual scenes are all well shot, edited, and performed.
This review of Before Night Falls (2000) was written by Nate W on 24 Jul 2010.
Before Night Falls has generally received positive reviews.
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