Awakenings is a 1990 drama film based on Oliver Sacks' memoir, Awakenings. It tells the true story of a doctor (Oliver Sacks, fictionalized as Malcolm Sayer) who, in 1969, discovers beneficial effects of the then-new drug L-Dopa. He applied it on catatonic patients who survived the 1917-1928 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica. Leonard Lowe (played by Robert De Niro) and the rest of the patients were awakened after decades of catatonic state and have to deal with a new life in a new time.

Directed by Penny Marshall, the film stars Robert DeNiro, Robin Williams, John Heard, Julie Kavner, Penelope Ann Miller and Max Von Sydow. The film also has cameos from Jazz legend Dexter Gordon (who died before the film's release), who appears as a patient and then-unknown Vin Diesel, who plays a hospital orderly.

The movie was adapted by Steven Fredrick Zaillian from the book of the same name. The book was also used by Harold Pinter as the basis of his one-act play A Kind of Alaska, performed in 1982.

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. Written by John Vogel