The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French fashion bible Elle magazine, has a devastating stroke at age 43. The damage to his brain stem results in locked-in syndrome, with which he is almost completely paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking an eye. Bauby painstakingly dictates his memoir via the only means of expression left to him.

Julian Schnabel's adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir earned near-universal critical admiration, with reviewers consistently singling out the film's immersive first-person cinematography and the emotional weight it wrings from a radically constrained premise. It stands as one of the most formally inventive biopics of its era.