Katya Balter

There are a couple other gems-a poignant lament on our mortality evokes a scornful “everyone dies, so what?” and a passage replete with descriptive phrases yields the incredibly helpful note: “lots of adjectives.” Of course my favorite has to be the note on page 207, when,

Schnabel’s film tackles one of the most difficult genres in filmmaking-biography-and succeeds not only in telling the life story of gay dissident and writer Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem) in alternately beautiful and grotesque episodes, but ultimately transforms the story of the writer’s struggle into a cutting