Buy this item with The Man Who Cried [2000] DVD ~ Christina Ricci today!

Total RRP: £22.98 Buy Together Today: £9.46

Basquiat [1997] DVD ~ Jeffrey Wright  (10)  £3.98

Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas  (4)  £6.74

Arizona Dream [1995] DVD ~ Johnny Depp  (10)

The Sea Inside [2005] DVD ~ Javier Bardem  (11)  £5.98

Private Resort [1985] (REGION 1) (NTSC) DVD ~ Rob Morrow

› Explore similar items : DVD (34) Books (6) Music (1)

Amazon.co.uk Review
Based on the posthumously published memoir by Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls is artist-director Julian Schnabel's second exercise in artist biography, but where Schnabel's earlier film Basquiat was relatively conventional, this film is bolder in both style and execution. Schnabel is perhaps too enamoured of his subject as a noble martyr, lending the film a somewhat inflated sense of importance. Still, it's rare to see an artist's life and work so elegantly interwoven, and Before Night Falls uses all of Arenas's life as its canvas, from impoverished youth to lively gay freedom in mid-1950's Cuba; imprisonment during Castro's antigay regime; and to New York City in 1980, followed by Arenas's battle with AIDS and subsequent suicide (depicted here as assisted) in 1990.

Through these extreme rises and falls, Arenas is always writing; his typewriter his most faithful lover and weapon (by way of smuggled manuscripts) against the dark forces that surround him. As Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, Arenas is "a serious actor's dream role: to be a gay Jesus in a modern Passion Play," and Javier Bardem--the first Spanish actor to receive an Oscar nomination--inhabits the role with subtle ferocity, charting this emotional odyssey with outer reserve but blazing infernos of internal passion. While Schnabel suffers from a hyperactive camera, there's poetry here--visual, dramatic, and literal--and vibrant humour to temper the deep tragedy of Arenas's life. Schnabel also uses his actor friends to good advantage: a nearly unrecognizable Sean Penn adds an ironic touch to his brief appearance as a peasant, and Johnny Depp is both funny and fearsome in dual roles as a drag queen and vicious army interrogator. --Jeff Shannon

DVD Description
A look at the life of the brilliant Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas, from his poverty-stricken childhood to his prosecution, torture and exile from Fidel Castro's Cuba.

See all Reviews

Arizona Dream [1995] DVD ~ Johnny Depp  (10)

The Man Who Cried [2000] DVD ~ Christina Ricci  (18)  £4.98

Nick Of Time [1996] DVD ~ Johnny Depp  (17)  £4.97

The Sea Inside [2005] DVD ~ Javier Bardem  (11)  £5.98

The Dancer Upstairs [2002] DVD ~ Javier Bardem