After unspooling at Cannes to critical acclaim and a best-director palm for Julian Schnabel, Gallic biopic "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" opened Stateside to rave reviews. The Meta Critic survey of 13 notices yielded a chart-topping 92 while the wider canvas of critics used by Rotten Tomatoes produced a score of 90 based on 40 reviews.

"Diving Bell" tells the tale of French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who learns to communicate via blinking his left eye after being paralyzed by a stroke. "A story like this would seem almost impossible to film," notes Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times. "And even if you figured out a way to do it, how would you prevent it from becoming one of those schematic, overly sentimental 'triumph of the human spirit' efforts that send sane viewers screaming for the exits?

"Starting from Ronald Harwood's script, filmmaker Schnabel, who learned French to make the story in its original language and won the best director prize at Cannes for his trouble, has avoided the obvious pitfalls and made virtues out of necessities. His imaginative and sensitive film, starring France's gifted Mathieu Amalric, is simultaneously uplifting and melancholy, suffused with an unexpected sense of possibility as much as the inevitable sense of loss.

"This has happened in part because Schnabel, though he's directed two other films, is at his core a visual artist. Working with the exceptional Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, he has infused the proceedings with the kind of imaginative feeling for rich and fecund imagery he brought to his earlier 'Before Night Falls.'" READ MORE