JAIL BARD.(Review) (movie review)

GRAHAM FULLER ON BEFORE NIGHT FALLS

Julian Schnabel's decision to follow his elliptical 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat with a film about Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas might intimate a morbid allegiance to the cult of the dead artist. But beyond vague structural similarities between the two films, there is little in Before Night Falls (which opened Dec. 22) to suggest that the cinematic possibilities that drew Schnabel to Arenas were the same that had drawn him to Basquiat.

Schnabel's self-conscious, intermittently beautiful movie about Basquiat's rapid rise and fall seemed ...

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