Movie Company: Columbia Pictures
Director: Penny Marshall
Producers: Elliot Abbott, Penny Marshall, Arne Schmidt, Lawrence Lasker
Writers: Steven Zaillian, based on Oliver Sacks’s book
Picture: David Eggby
Music: Miroslaw Ondrícek
Genre: drama
Budget: -
Total gross: 52 096 475$ (USA)
MPAA rating: PG-13

Cast:

Robert DeNiro, Robin Williams, Penelope Ann Miller, Vin Diesel (uncredited)

Summary:

A new doctor finds himself with a ward full of comatose patients. He is disturbed by them and the fact that they have been comatose for decades with no hope of any cure. When he finds a possible chemical cure he gets permission to try it on one of them. When the first patient awakes, he is now an adult having gone into a coma in his early teens. The film then delights in the new awareness of the patients and then on the reactions of their relatives to the changes in the newly awakened.

Vin was an extra in this movie; he can be seen only briefly as a hospital orderly.

Links:

• Awakenings discussion on the message board