Che: Part 1

Dir Steven Soderbergh w/ Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir. 135 min. Special Presentations.

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BY Jason Anderson   August 26, 2008 20:08

Editorial Rating:

Wildly ambitious and not a little demanding, the first half of Steven Soderbergh’s Latin American epic contains a barrage of details great and small about Guevara’s most triumphant years. Crosscutting between Che’s celebrity-minting 1964 trip to New York to speak before the United Nations and the grueling, bloody Cuban campaign that originally brought the Argentine radical such renown, the movie successfully eschews the clichés of the biopic and the war movie yet can’t quite develop a satisfying replacement for that vocabulary. As a result, it only comes fully alive during the final sequence, a riveting recreation of the decisive battle for Santa Clara.

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