Before Night Falls

In adapting celebrated Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls, the fiery memoir published shortly after his AIDS-related death in 1990, Julian Schnabel has taken some liberties. Schnabel and his cowriters toned down its bilious, anti-Castro tone, rearranged events, invented characters and trimmed most of the book's graphic sex scenes. Yet the figure of Arenas still springs full-blown from this powerful film, thanks largely to the filmmakers use of Arenas's own writing, and an incredible performance from Javier Bardem. Cuba, 1943: Arenas is born dirt poor to a beautiful mother (Olatz Lopez Garmendia) and a waywa...