आलोचक समीक्षाएं

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.

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.

Engaging enough as polemics go, but unlikely to change many minds.

The aural and visual overload that marks most of the director's work is here in spades--few documentaries look and sound so distinctive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stone's film, more an act of boosterism than inquiry, is a tremendous missed opportunity.

South of the Border's subjects are masters at cooking bullshit, and Stone just eats it up.