IMDb > Before Night Falls (2000)
Before Night Falls
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Before Night Falls (2000) More at IMDbPro »

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Overview

User Rating:
7.2/10   9,677 votes
MOVIEmeter: ?
Up 1% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.
Director:
Julian Schnabel
Writers:
Cunningham O'Keefe (written by) &
Lázaro Gómez Carriles (written by) ...
more
Contact:
View company contact information for Before Night Falls on IMDbPro.
Release Date:
26 January 2001 (USA) more
Genre:
Biography | Drama more
Plot:
Episodic look at the life of Cuban poet and novelist, Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), from his childhood... more | add synopsis
Plot Keywords:
more
Awards:
Nominated for Oscar. Another 11 wins & 15 nominations more
NewsDesk:
(25 articles)
Decade in Review: 2000 Top Ten
 (From FilmExperience. 5 November 2009, 1:07 PM, PST)

50 Essential Foreign Films 2000-2008 (Part 1) - Spotlight on French Cinema
 (From The Movie Fanatic. 2 September 2009, 4:17 AM, PDT)

User Comments:
Engaging, poetic, touching bio-pic about Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. more (124 total)

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)
Olatz López Garmendia ... Reinaldo's Mother (as Olatz Lopez Garmendia)
Giovanni Florido ... Young Reinaldo (as Giovani Florido)
Loló Navarro ... Reinaldo's Grandmother
Sebastián Silva ... Reinaldo's Father
Carmen Beato ... Teacher
Cy Schnabel ... Smallest School Child (as Cy)
Olmo Schnabel ... Smallest School Child
Vito Maria Schnabel ... Teenage Reinaldo
Pedro Armendáriz Jr. ... Reinaldo's Grandfather (as Pedro Armendáriz)

Diego Luna ... Carlos

Lia Chapman ... Lolin

Sean Penn ... Cuco Sanchez
Jerzy Skolimowski ... Professor
Aquiles Benites ... Translator
Eva Piaskowska ... Pretty Blonde Student
more
Create a character page for: ?

Additional Details

Also Known As:
Antes que anochezca (USA: Spanish title)
more
MPAA:
Rated R for strong sexual content, some language and brief violence.
Runtime:
133 min | South Korea:123 min
Country:
USA
Colour:
Colour (Technicolor)
Aspect Ratio:
1.85 : 1 more
Sound Mix:
Dolby Digital
Certification:
New Zealand:R13 | Canada:14 (Nova Scotia) | Canada:14A (Alberta) | Canada:18A (British Columbia) | Canada:AA (Ontario) | Canada:PA (Manitoba) | UK:15 (cut) | Portugal:M/16 | Canada:14A (Ontario - 2006) | Finland:K-15 (2007) (self applied) (TV rating) | Finland:K-18 (2006) (self applied) (TV rating) | Argentina:16 | Australia:MA | Chile:18 | France:U | Peru:18 | Singapore:R(A) | Spain:13 | Sweden:11 | Switzerland:16 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:16 (canton of Vaud) | USA:R | South Korea:15 (cut)
Filming Locations:
New York, USA more

Fun Stuff

Trivia:
Set in Cuba, the film was made entirely in Mexico, with Mexico City doubling as Havana. Julian Schnabel said the crew was so pleasant to work with that, if he was making a film in the arctic, he would use a Mexican crew. more
Quotes:
Reinaldo Arenas: [narrating] Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual, so was Michelangelo, Socrates, Shakespeare, and almost every other figure that has formed what we have come to understand as beauty. more
Movie Connections:
Featured in The 2001 IFP/West Independent Spirit Awards (2001) (TV) more
Soundtrack:
Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes (Lacrime Di Re) more

FAQ

This FAQ is empty. Add the first question.
27 out of 34 people found the following comment useful.
Engaging, poetic, touching bio-pic about Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas., 25 April 2004
8/10
Author: Ben_Cheshire from Oz

Incredible central performance from Javier Bardem ties the film together and makes you really care what happens. Great supporting players: Sean Penn has one incredible scene early on, who had us convinced he was Cuban. We didn't at all recognise him. Johnny Depp plays two small parts, but two very memorable ones. Growly-voiced Michael Wincott (played the bad guy in The Crow and Along Came a Spider and The Doors' manager in The Doors) is memorable. Andrea di Stefano is great as a central antagonist of Reinaldo, as is the now-Hollywood-famous Olivier Martinez who plays a touching, platonic friend to Reinaldo.

Beautifully photographed and directed in an admirable manner that draws attention to style every now and then in a poetic way very fitting for a bio-pic about a poet, and at other times just utilises style to tells the story very well, and seem not to be fussing about style at all.

There are scenes here where the sound effects track stops and this gorgeous cello music by Carter Burwell (composer of Being John Malkovich, Meet Joe Black, Man who Wasn't There, with another beautiful score) plays while we watch Bardem sitting in a club while people dance around him, and the music tells us he is far away. It is a wonderful scene, akin to Kurosawa's use of music in the brilliant burning of the first castle scene in Ran.

The way the camera tells this story was so marvellous and slick (though using rough camera work to tell moments of uneasiness, importantly this is not over-used as it was in the recent Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) that i knew the filmmaker had been influenced by American filmmaking, but throughout i had no idea the guy actually WAS American! The TV program misleadingly told us it was a Cuban movie (which it is not - it is an American production with Spanish, Cuban and American actors)

I'm even more shocked considering this is the guy who made Basquiat, which i always thought was more a tele-movie, and more about art than about movie-style. Julian Schnabel, i now learn, was a neo-expressionist painter in the 80's! Basquiat, about an artist, perhaps was a movie where he was making the transition between art-language and movie-language. Before Night Falls uses traditional storytelling, to be sure, but it has such a spellbinding cinematic quality i felt sure its director was one with cinema on the brain. Perhaps Schnabel has caught the bug after all.

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