Basquiat 1996  R, 108 min.
Genre: Drama
Director: Julian Schnabel
Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Michael Wincott, Benicio Del Toro, Claire Forlani, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Parker Posey
This is the biography of the young American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright) who began as a graffiti artist and soared to fame in the 1980s (due, in part, to the sponsorship of Andy Warhol) and was dead from a heroin overdose at the age of 28.
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Before Night Falls 2000  R, 125 min.
Genre: Drama
Director: Julian Schnabel
Cast: Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Andrea Di Stefano, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Michael Wincott, Najwa Nimri, Hector Babenco, Jerzy Skolimowski, Vito Maria Schnabel
Noted anti-Castro Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem) is the subject of this film about a poor boy who grows up and joins Castro's revolutionary forces. After the revolution, Arenas moves to Havana, publishes his first novel, and participates in the gay underground. His actions are considered dangerous by Castro's political regime, and Arenas is sentenced to concentration camps and later is exiled. Finally free and living in NY, Arenas contracts the AIDs virus and ultimately kills himself. What makes this film extraordinary is not the plot; instead, it is the painstaking blend of the movie's sights and sounds that tugs at viewers' emotions. Bardem was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award.
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 2007 PG-13, 112 min.
Genre: Drama
Director: Julian Schnabel
Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josee Croze, Anne Consigny, Patrick Chesnais, Niels Arestrup, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Marina Hands, Max von Sydow, Isaach De Bankole, Emma de Caunes, Gerard Watkins, Jean-Philippe Ecoffey
Based on French "Elle" editor Jean-Dominique Bauby's best-selling memoir, this story shows how Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) suffers a stroke and the psychological torment he endures when he suffers "locked-in syndrome" in which his brain is working, but he is not able to speak nor move his body. The one thing Bauby can do is blink one eye, and, with help from speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze), he is able to form sentences by blinking when she calls out a letter in the alphabet. As a result, Bauby is able to author a manuscript revealing what it is like to be trapped inside one's body and relating fantasies that he has imagined. The film received four Academy Award nominations including Best Director.
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| 1. Basquiat (1996)
2. Before Night Falls (2000)
3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
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