Evita (1996)

This film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical attempts to reduce decades of Argentinian history into two hours of Tim Rice's bawdy rhyming couplets and because of this is an almost unwatchable movie-length rock opera music video featuring, among other embarrassments, suited Argentinian statesmen rapping to funky synthesizers, Antonio Banderas drifting around as a everywhere narrator who often has to nod and look unembarrassed as he waits a beat or two for the music to let him finish what he is saying, bawdy rhymes about Argentina's reverred/abhorred Eva Peron played by an out-of-her-depth Madonna and, the musical's biggest sin, apart from repeated scenes shot on the balcony of the Casa de Rosa, an almost entirely absent Buenos Aires.

★☆☆☆☆

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Neruda (2016)

In 1948, Communist Party of Chile Senator, the poet Pablo Neruda and his wife went on the run after the Chilean Government issued an order for his arrest; this movie injects into the history a Government-hired detective whose success or failure in turning up Neruda means the difference between him being forgotten - a failed everyman antagonist - or remembered for eternity - a hero protagonist - an analogy that allows the movie to demonstrate the rousing nature of Neruda's poetry and politics in (a beautifully realised) Chile of the times, but sadly the movie tries for epic and ends up feeling fleeting with its split narrative.

★★★☆☆

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The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

You'll yearn for your own adventures watching this account of Che Guevara's formative motorbike ride around South America with his friend, Alberto Granado, but you'll also wonder at the characteristics of the 23-year-old Argentinian medical student that see him so politicised by his adventure that - in events beyond the scope of this travelogue - he goes on to become leader of the Cuban Revolution, then a reviled mass-murdering terrorist killed by a CIA-supported Bolivian military, then a contemporary hipster icon.

★★★★☆

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