'CHE' TO GET PALM D'OR? PLUS VARIETY REVIEW

Director Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour subtitled Che Guevera biopic, "Che" (presented as two films entitled "The Argentine" and "Guerilla") recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

The online critical reception is already pretty good but a tad divided. The movie's questionable prospects and albeit controversial depiction of the Argentine revolutionary, (an uncanny Benicio Del Toro), have some waiting on the sidelines. That said, Cinematical’s Kim Voyer is incredibly stoked on both films and believes that bespeckled Soderbergh is a lock for the festival’s top prize, the Palm d’Or.

Also, here's an excerpt of the not-so-positive Variety review:

"No doubt it will be back to the drawings board for “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s intricately ambitious, defiantly nondramatic four-hour, 18-minute presentation of scenes from the life of revolutionary icon Che Guevara. 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. Originally announced as two separate films, “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla,” to be released separately, the film was shown as one picture, with intermission, under the title “Che” (although neither this nor any other credits appeared onscreen) in its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Neither half feels remotely like a satisfying stand-alone film, while the whole offers far too many aggravations for its paltry rewards. Scattered partisans are likely to step forward, but the pic in its current form is a commercial impossibility, except on television or DVD."

To read the rest of the reveiw, click HERE.