Unconventional Butterfly Soars

Critics adore The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a movie based on the memoir of the paralyzed editor of French Elle. In the New Yorker, David Denby writes that the film has "some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies."

The film, directed by Julian Schnabel, uses unconventional cinematography to swoop in and out of the main character's trapped consciousness. "The images are sumptuous, when they aren't claustrophobic," writes Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal. And in Rolling Stone, Peter Travers praises the director's eye and honesty: "Bogus uplift isn't in Schnabel's DNA." (More movies stories.)