The Motorcycle Diaries

Walter Salles's well-observed movie downplays politics for humanism. It's a picturesque tale that, hobbled by its episodic structure, never achieves full steam.

Well-acted, beautifully shot and broad and personal, The Motorcycle Diaries is nonetheless undermined in the end by a clunky search for meaning and depth that seems forced.

Quietly exhilarating, soulful and sincerely romantic.

It's about the gradual wakening into awareness, the graduation from carefree youth to responsible adulthood.

It evokes on me a strange liberating sensation that captures me and, above all, leaves a trail of enormous visual beauty with the panoramas shown during the reconstruction of Ernesto Guevara's journey. [Full review in Spanish]

The Motorcycle Diaries takes you along on a meandering road trip through South America with a young Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary.

A breathtaking road trip movie across South America. A coming of age & consciousness story carried by a strong performance from Bernal.

This is radical chic without the radicalism, seemingly geared toward people who find Guevara vaguely admirable but would be turned off by talk of class struggle and revolution.