Before Night Falls

Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem) is a Cuban poet and novelist whose life spans several decades, and whose writing and homosexuality mark him as an enemy in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Julian Schnabel adapts Arenas's own autobiography, drawing also on Jana Boková's 1990 documentary Havana. Bardem holds the screen with a hunched, watchful stillness, a man whose only possession is the page he keeps writing.