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Best movie of this year hands down!

One of my all time favorites.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

This film is a true story and like with all true stories we get a fantasized version of the story itself. We are dealing here with post encephalitic patients who have become absolutely catatonic. A new drug, quite experimental and that has not been tested really on humans properly, is used in a psychiatric institution where they have a dozen or so patients in that situation. First one patient, and then the whole group. The result is spectacular. They wake up and they start having a normal life, well normal is a big word. They just try to adjust to the reality they finally see and within the limited freedom they can have within an institution out of which they cannot go without being totally supervised by professionals. The first patient who was provided with the drug, Leonard, becomes very autonomous to the point of establishing a relationship with a visiting young woman and then asking for the right to just go out on his own for a walk. The film uses the word "miracle" too much. There is no miracle with chemical stuff and drugs. There are only physiological reactions to the drugs. They can be positive. They can be negative. They can last for a long time with a regular treatment or use, or they can only last a short period of time, an awakening and nothing else and then the patients go back to the catatonic state they used to be in and they may have spent thirty years in. The film at the end is not hiding this fact, but the term "miracle" is false in this context.The film insists on the reactions of the patients, on the way they enter a phase where they want to have some kind of real living, or at least what they imagine they would enjoy. The film is totally ignorant of a simple fact. These catatonic people are catatonic for us but they still can hear, they still can see, they still can enjoy the benefits of their senses and they know the standard language that is spoken around them. The film does not concentrate on this fact we know today, we would concentrate on today: the patients have heard a lot and seen a lot, even if they are locked up in an institution. But they have received a lot of oral language spoken around them and there is no reason to believe they did not understand it since they may have lost the power to speak, but we know with autistic kids who do not speak for years, that when they start speaking they start speaking normal language because they have learned and assimilated language while in their autistic non-speaking phase.We know today that it is important to go on speaking to catatonic and comatose people because they hear and they receive that language and they react to it, even if we have no external sign about it. It is amazing at times to find out that a person who gets out of a long comatose state is able to say what he heard and had saved in his memory during that period. It is not systematic. It is not automatic. It is not perfect and extensive. But it is, even if limited. Just the same way there is a womb memory that enables a newborn to remember what it was like in the womb, there is a comatose memory that enables the comatose person when he/she comes out to remember what it was like when they were "gone," and what was said about them.I must say that in 1990 we were still far away from what we know today. The film though is interesting because of the concentration on the people around the sick people. The family for one, at least one mother, the first patient's mother, Ms. Lowe, who is grateful while the awakening lasts but becomes dubious and skeptical when the awakening comes to an end, and Leonard, her son, falls back into the horror of a semi-catatonic state. The doctors are also shown as being over-cautious, and yet they are justified to be so but we cannot get out of the picture their refusal of a free walk in the city for Leonard as being a cause of the change in the "community" because the patients all knew about the rebellious state Leonard fell into afterward that also caused a relapse in his disease. The most interesting people are the nurses and other personnel. They are supportive of the change and the new experimental drugs because they want their patients to become more normal people, people with whom they can speak and exchange some conversation. That's the positive point. The medical profession is not necessarily of the torturing brutal unempathetic type. Somewhere they are still human. And that's maybe the most important "miracle." The battle for human treatments is not lost before being fought because the professional personnel in these situations or hospital wards just hope their patients' situation can be improved. So, a good film for a hot summer night.Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

The victims of an encephalitis epidemic many years ago have been catatonic ever since, but now a new drug offers the prospect of reviving them. Awakenings benefits from the excellent work from both Robert De Niro and the late Robin Williams but also a story that is very dramatic and optimistic at the same time. The direction was superb and De Niro's perfomance was just fascinating, Penelope Ann Miller most known for her work in films like Kindergarten Cop, The Messengers and Carlito's Way also does a very good job. I think alot of people will appreciate what this film was going for and will definitely feel sorry and inspired from it's main characters. (10/10)

This is based on true life event and has great actors in the lead. I don't know how it is I had not seen it before, but while I was looking for something else on Netflix I stumbled across this. Some people may think De Niro lost his touch once he got into comedy, but you cannot for one second doubt or critisize him in the Dramas he played in.This one in particular, was not easy to play. And I can only imagine a method actor like him, what he must have gone through. Well what he made himself endure. While there always are things that are going to be altered from reality for dramatic purposes, what happened in 1969, what the doctors and patients went through is tough to put into words. It is something that is touching, sad and uplifting at various points of the movie. At the end, you get a bit of extra information on the real people. But even without that added text, the movie was clear. The power of the mind is big ... and the power of movies tries to match it here ...

Awakenings is, both the happiest and saddest film I have ever seen. It is an emotional roller coaster. It is beautifully filmed. Robert De Niro and Robin Williams are exceptional in this movie. I have never reviewed a film before, but this one was so powerful I felt obliged to let others know. I'm not overly emotional but this one had me holding in the tears with a knot in my throat. It takes an exceptional film to do what this one does to you. There are a lot of meaningless ones out there, I wouldn't even call some of them films, but THIS is A FILM WORTH WATCHING.10/10