Spanning several decades, this powerful biopic offers a glimpse into the life of famed Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, an artist who was vilified for his homosexuality in Fidel Castro's Cuba.
Ratings
Curator score: 6.7/10
IMDb: 7.1/10
Letterboxd: 3.65/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 74%
Metacritic: 85
TMDB: 6.6/10
Director
Julian Schnabel
Production
El Mar Pictures, Grandview Pictures
Cast
Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Johnny Depp, Andrea Di Stefano, Santiago Magill, John Ortiz, Héctor Babenco, Francisco Gattorno, Marisol Padilla Sánchez, Michael Wincott, Sean Penn, Najwa Nimri, Diego Luna, Diahnne Abbott, Jerzy Skolimowski, Alfredo Villa, Rene Rivera, Maurice Compte, Vincent Laresca, Olatz López Garmendia
Curator Review
Verdict
A passionate, uneven biopic that works best as a showcase for Javier Bardem and as a portrait of an artist crushed by repression. Its politics can feel blunt and its English-language approach is awkward, but the film has real force, visual flair, and emotional urgency.
Best for
Viewers interested in queer history and political repression
Fans of performance-driven biopics
Audiences drawn to literary artists and exile narratives
People who like intense, stylized prestige dramas
Skip if
You want a strictly objective or subtle historical drama
You are sensitive to biopics that feel politically schematic
You dislike English-language films set in non-English-speaking cultures
You prefer restrained, naturalistic storytelling
Overview
Before Night Falls is less interested in tidy biography than in the idea of an artist as a threat to power. Julian Schnabel stages Reinaldo Arenas’ life as a sequence of eruptions: desire, censorship, prison, exile, and the stubborn act of writing anyway. The result is messy in places, but it has conviction and a strong sense of artistic identity.
Worth noting
Javier Bardem gives the film its center of gravity, playing Arenas with charisma, vulnerability, and defiance. The supporting cast is used more as atmosphere than as fully developed character work, yet the film’s emotional through-line remains clear: beauty, language, and sexuality become forms of resistance under authoritarian rule.
Bottom line
The movie’s biggest weakness is also part of its controversy: it can feel politically simplified and occasionally too eager to turn suffering into thesis. Still, as a feverish portrait of censorship, exile, and creative survival, it leaves a mark. It is imperfect, but rarely inert.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Jasmine (3.5★) · 474 likes
WHY👏🏼WAS👏🏼THIS👏🏼IN👏🏼ENGLISH👏🏼?
Yosmel Araujo (5★) · 176 likes
LGBT
People that make art are dangerous to any dictatorship. They create beauty. Any beauty is the enemy. Artists are escapists. Artists are counter-revolutionary, and you are a counter-revolutionary, Reinaldo Arenas, and you know why? Because there's a man that cannot govern the terrain called beauty, so he wants to eliminate it.
"I want to die at the end of the day,in the high seas, with my face towards the skywhen it seems like agony is just a… more
Kylo (3★) · 125 likes
The ease with which Johnny Depp plays both a transvestite smuggling contraband for the boys and a prison warden in one movie. Javier Bardem also carried this as a gay Cuban poet.
Kevin Bertolero (3★) · 93 likes
Javier Bardem’s face pressed up against Johnny Depp’s bulge—that’s cinéma baby!
༘ ade ༘ (4★) · 77 likes
Everything about this movie was phenomenal! I really don't have anything articulate to say, yuh.
YOU 👏 CAN'T 👏 GOVERN 👏 BEAUTY 👏