Review: 'Che'

Well into the fourth hour of "Che," the extraordinary and challenging new work by director Steven Soderbergh, the film's subject -- the Argentine-born political insurgent Ernesto Guevara -- strikes a recalcitrant horse. Wheezing and depleted from severe asthma, his dream of a pan-Latin American revolution imploding disastrously in the mountains of Bolivia, the uncharacteristically frustrated Guevara, played with an unforced authority by Benicio Del Toro, lashes out against the beast. It's the only emotionally naked moment in a work that studiously resists the traps and conventions of mainstream film biography.

By Sheri Linden

December 12, 2008