The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de Motocicleta) Reviews
Top Critic
A marvelous road picture and boys-become-men adventure, full of the best kind of idealism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
A dull, unsatisfying experience -- as well as inconclusive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
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.
| Original Score: B-
Quietly exhilarating, soulful and sincerely romantic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It's about the gradual wakening into awareness, the graduation from carefree youth to responsible adulthood.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Whether you want to see The Motorcycle Diaries as entirely a personal story or as social and political allegory, it captures a far different and far more vulnerable Ernesto Guevara than the one we think we know.
I think it is beautifully shot, and the chemistry between these two young actors is terrific.
What Bernal and this well-wrought movie convey so well is the charisma that would soon become a part of human history and, yes, T-shirts.
A surprisingly effective re-creation of a Latin American Bing and Bob on the Road to History.
There are many moments that add up to a grander appreciation of a memorable journey and an unforgettable character.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
You get so caught up in the beauty of the images, and lost in the weathered faces found along the way, you quite forget that you're traveling with Che Guevara -- which is, of course, exactly what the original experience would be.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Revisits Guevara's 8,000-mile tour of South America -- and the origins of his personal revolution -- with humor, exquisite compassion and visual grace.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It's got poetry to it -- the poetry of humanity.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
If I was moved despite my ingrained skepticism about Ché Guevara and Castro's Cuba, you probably will be too.
Best savored as a beautifully photographed and scored road trip and as a character study of disparate men who somehow fit together as friends.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Call The Motorcycle Diaries more hagiography than biography if you like, but it's undoubtedly a beautifully crafted and heartfelt one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Salles travels a road paved with a youthful hunger for experience. Like Guevara, he wants us to keep our eyes wide open, to let the world work on us.
| Original Score: B
About the personal transformations, the modes of empathy that precede ideology.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Interesting in the manner of a travelogue but simplistic as a study of Che's political conversion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
For a movie, this feels inadequate, despite its splendors and, later, its social dismay. It does, however, have the makings of a grand postcard.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Credit Mr. Salles with making all the right artistic decisions and turning what could have been a routine polemical film into a fresh mind-changing experience.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Essentially an overly long endurance test, and it wears us out by the end.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
This is the kind of impassioned, richly detailed character piece that reminds us why we fell in love with movies in the first place.
| Original Score: 4/4
Tells a very personal tale with a central theme we can all relate to: the loss of innocence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Reaches back to the past to suggest that life is full of turning points, some of which we recognize and some we don't, and that, in a dangerous world, youth and friendship are to be treasured because, like life, they can pass so quickly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A riveting travelogue / character study filled with mythic landscapes and poignant encounters of near-molecular intimacy.
As this soulful and reflective film, as gentle as it is potent, ably demonstrates, transformation is no less convincing for being a gradual process that comes on its subjects all unawares.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
A gorgeous, poetic and stirring epic.
| Original Score: 4/4
Mostly, it is a conventional road movie -- a buddy comedy even -- about the quests of two likable guys.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Walter Salles's stirring and warm-hearted film reconstructs a journey across South America taken by Ernesto Guevara before his career as a revolutionary.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
If the bike is a train wreck, Salles' own vehicle is lithe and supple.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Operates under the spectacularly simpleminded idea that Marxism came down to 'caring.'
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
The insertion of documentary rigor into something as ravishing as The Motorcycle Diaries smacks, I fear, of the picturesque.
Lovely to look at but insipid, a lavishly illustrated Rough Guide to white liberal self-affirmation.
A deeply felt and beautifully acted hagiography -- a portrait of a citizen of the world as a young man.
A mesmerizing look at an asthmatic, rich-boy medical student in the act of discovering his insurgent spirit.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A beautifully wrought account of the dawning of the social conscience of one of the 20th century's most romanticized revolutionaries.
A smartly scoped story of great personal growth and transformation.
