First half of Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour worship service in honor of Che Guevara, conducted in Spanish with English subtitles, really two distinct movies. This first, in wide screen and in roomy frames, operates a time shuttle between vivid color re-enactments of the overthrow of Batista in the late Fifties and grainy black-and-white faux news coverage of Guevara’s visit to New York in the mid-Sixties for interviews with the press and speeches at the United Nations. Nothing is sustained (the shuttle runs continuously) until the extended battle in the last reel or so. We instead get scenes, glimpses, moving snapshots of the Lifestyle of the Revolutionary and Famous: walking through the woods, resting up, slapping comrades on the back, exhorting the troops, etc. There are no rises and falls in the narrative contour, just a kind of flatline. Benicio del Toro and Demián Bechir can pass for Guevara and Castro as well as anybody could in the same beards and hats, and with the same pipe and cigar. Catalina Sandino Moreno, Santiago Cabrera, Elvira Minguez, Julia Ormond. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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