Synopsis
A road trip across five countries to explore the social and political movements as well as the mainstream media's misperception of South America while interviewing seven of its elected presidents.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Oliver StoneSelf
- Hugo ChávezSelf
- Evo MoralesSelf
- Luiz Inácio Lula da SilvaSelf
- Cristina Fernández de KirchnerSelf
- Tariq AliSelf
- Raúl CastroSelf
- Rafael CorreaSelf
- Fernando LugoSelf
- Néstor KirchnerSelf
Recommendations
- 83
Entertainment Weekly
Yes, Stone gets cozy with Hugo Chávez, soft-pedaling the Venezuelan president's crackdown tendencies, but he also captures South America in a paradigm shift, wrenching itself free of centuries of colonial control. The film is rose-colored agitprop, but it catches a current of history. - 80
The Hollywood Reporter
Good-humored, illuminating and without cant, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border is a rebuttal of what he views as the fulminations and lies of right-wing media at home and abroad regarding the socialist democracies of South America. - 75
NPR
Engaging enough as polemics go, but unlikely to change many minds. - 60
Time Out
The aural and visual overload that marks most of the director's work is here in spades--few documentaries look and sound so distinctive. - 60
The New York Times
As anyone who remembers "JFK," his 1991 film about the Kennedy assassination, can attest, Mr. Stone has his own paranoid tendencies, but they are muted in this provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism. - 55
Movieline
Though he lavishes praise on his subjects for being hyper-masculine and free-thinking, Stone is downright girlish in his devotion, scoffing at charges made against the leaders rather than examining them. - 40
Variety
The documentary offers little genuine information and no investigative research, adopting a style even more polemical than Stone's earlier docus on Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. - 40
New York Daily News
Unabashedly one-sided, this biography of Chávez - and several other Latin American politicians - does raise some valid concerns about what Stone calls the "manipulative power of the media." So it's too bad he's as guilty of partisanship as the right-wing outlets he reviles.
