Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) Reviews

Triumph of the human spirit to the Miramax, predictable in its crowd-pleasing, middlebrow vulgarity but with a few inventive, free-floating passages

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An almost excessively beautiful aestheticization of misery.

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A textbook example of a director prizing himself over his material.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

An arresting true story and a ravishing visual creation, but the two remain separate entities that do not support one another but get in each other's way instead.

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The Sea Inside by way of Lady in the Lake.

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As a writer, I admire it greatly...As a moviegoer I'm less certain about the movie's effectiveness.

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Optimistically, Schnabel would like to fill such an ordeal with color, music and hot nurses. Wedding himself to Bauby's real trauma, though, seems beyond him.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/6

From its relentless visual distortion to its wearying parade of Felliniesque fantasy sequences, Schnabel's film wants you to know that it's art with a capital 'A.' It's also disability porn with a capital 'D.'

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It would be inhuman not to empathize with the actual man's plight, but the movie is a sophisticated prod, pushing us inside its own Bauby.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Engaging, moving, and even has a good message, but it's also a film that slips in the follow through.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Feeling reduced now to a "zombie," denied what he most wants, sensual pleasures and connections, Bauby is angry and grateful at once. That gap is the movie's most affecting dilemma, unresolved by its many aesthetic effects.

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The movie's small powerful moments are worth more than the entirety of your average noble-sufferer weepie.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

This is the second best films of 2007 and by far the most moving.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

It's a subject and a film that perfectly blends the tragic with the triumphant.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

...a film about a stranded man that bustles with vigorous energy, an exploration of the oceans inside human consciousness.

Full Review | Original Score: 91/100

Here is the life force at its most insistent, lashing out against fate with stubborn resolve. And also with lust, hunger, humor and all of the other notes that this man once played so easily.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

This is a special motion picture that achieves its higher agenda of doing much more than idly plucking at a few heartstrings.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

The film is a triumph of empathy.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Tough to watch? Sure. Worth it? Absolutely. Perhaps the most inspiring film in many years.

| Original Score: 4/5

It is wonderful: a rhapsodic adaptation of a memoir, a visual marvel that wraps its subject in screen romanticism without romanticizing his affliction.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4