My Left Foot (1989)

This is a biopic about an Irish artist who was born with a terrible disease called cerebral palsy. This disease renders his total body motionless except his left foot. I started this movie 4 times before because of various recommendations/excellent reviews etc. But I could never watch it beyond the first 5 minutes as I formed a certain preconceived notion that it might be 'full of self-pity' or 'tragical in nature' or 'dry and documentary like'. Somehow today I forced myself to drop all the notions that I had about it and go ahead and just finish it. To my surprise this movie was anything but what I thought it would be. The artist never ever shows 'self-pity'..he becomes successful/famous/rich..and his life is so rich with interesting incidents that it barely sounded like a documentary at any point in time. To be candid, i was in tears throughout the movie, not because of pity/sadness but because of the resoluteness that the artist has shown. Recently I watched 'There will be blood' and then I decided to watch all the other movies of Daniel Day Lewis and he is totally spellbinding in this one. No wonder DDL won an Oscar for his role in this movie!