Che

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

In both halves, Soderbergh emphasizes observation over ideology with an eye toward the mundane details of life on the front lines of a revolution.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Che looks dazzling, whether the camera is weaving through a battle or trying to bore into Che's haunted soul. Del Toro stands up to Soderbergh's relentless scrutiny. As for the movie, it's a reward to audiences eager to break from the play-it-safe pack. Game on.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Benicio Del Toro, one of the film's producers, gives a heroic performance, not least because it's self-effacing.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Leaving aside politics, it's quite an achievement in art.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

It's all about Guevara's education as a revolutionary and his development as a leader in the jungles and in battle.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Every Bolivian sequence has its Cuban parallel, which is why Che's two parts are best seen together. Guerrilla may be the more realized of the two--and could certainly stand on its own--but it is only comprehensible in the light of The Argentine. Elevating Guerrilla to tragedy, The Argentine puts some hope in hopelessness--and even in history.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

What this slow-moving but fascinating two-part portrait does do is hunker down in the jungles and mountains of Cuba and (in the second part) Bolivia, capturing in keen, almost Zen-like detail the trudging and trekking, the recruiting and strategizing, the fighting and the philosophizing.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Che is Soderbergh's most interesting film in years, defiantly eccentric and absorbing at its best.

Los Angeles Times Sheri Linden

The political realities of his legacy can be endlessly debated, but in this flawed work of austere beauty, the logistics of war and the language of revolution give way to something greater, a struggle that may be defined by politics but can't be contained by it.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

I was never bored, in four hours-plus. Whether or not it ends up becoming a great film (or films), this is miles and miles beyond anything I thought Soderbergh could create from this material.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale.

The Hollywood Reporter Peter Brunette

If this earnest, two-part biopic with a total running time of 268 minutes sometimes lacks cinematic flair, the straight-ahead, chronologically-driven film will inform and, to a somewhat lesser extent, excite viewers everywhere.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

As political theater, Che moves from faith to impotence, which is certainly a valid reading of Communism in the 20th century. Yet as drama, that makes the second half of the film borderline deadly.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Che is a mass of contradictions, perhaps like the iconic revolutionary himself.

Variety Todd McCarthy

If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he's portrayed here.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Although Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che may have an epic running time of almost 4-1/2 hours, its scope is surprisingly narrow.

Time Richard Corliss

In the end, the Cuban newspaper was nearly right: it's not the Castro character but the whole of this grand, doomed experiment that lacks "charisma and depth."

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Che is an impressive physical feat, but especially in the second part, which gives you day after day of rebels being killed and indigenous poor people not joining the good fight, you start to look forward to Che getting riddled by bullets. The whole movie is a forced march.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

It would be comforting, and tidy, to suggest that the director had waited all his life for the chance to make this film, as if it meant everything to him; yet I still have no idea what truly quickens his heart, and at some level, for all the movie’s narrative momentum, Che retains the air of a study exercise--of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one's total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie?

ReelViews James Berardinelli

What potentially could have been the greatest asset possessed by Che - its unapologetic length - turns into its greatest detriment.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto Che Guevara's political life.

New York Post Kyle Smith

You can't spell cliché without Che. And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right?

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

If Soderbergh's ambition was to make us feel just how dull it would be to a woods-dwelling communist guerrilla, he succeeded.