75. BEFORE NIGHT FALLS
 
United States
dir. Julian Schnabel
world premiere 2000
U.S. release 2000
 

 
Because Reinaldo Arenas's prose is an inebriating, sometimes maddening blend of seduction, hedonism, naïveté, and political lucidity, and the film blends unbashful doses of all those flavors into its bracing sounds and images. The rare film in which, truly, almost every still-frame would make for an arresting photograph.