Oliver Stone goes on a political tour of South America, interviewing its new wave of socialist leaders in an eye-opening documentary. In earlier projects about Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat, Stone made the political too personal, but in South of the Border he's onto something larger than the cult of personality. 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.
