Che

Steven Soderbergh's Che opened in 2008 as a single 257-minute film at the Cannes Festival, where Benicio del Toro won Best Actor. The work was subsequently released theatrically as two separate features — Che: Part One — The Argentine and Che: Part Two — Guerrilla — both of which became internationally acclaimed for their procedural patience. Soderbergh shot in Spanish throughout, on the RED One digital camera, with del Toro inhabiting Ernesto Guevara across approximately a decade of revolutionary biography.

Part One reconstructs the 1956–59 Cuban Revolution from the landing of the Granma in Oriente province through the Battle of Santa Clara to Castro's entry into Havana, intercut with Guevara's 1964 speech to the United Nations General Assembly. Part Two follows Guevara's catastrophic Bolivian campaign of 1966–67. Demián Bichir plays Fidel Castro; Catalina Sandino Moreno plays Aleida March, Guevara's second wife; Franka Potente, Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon appear in supporting roles.

The film operates as procedural rather than biopic — Soderbergh refuses every standard biographical-arc convention, declining to dramatise Guevara's childhood, his motorcycle journey, his domestic life, his ideological evolution. What remains is the granular work of small-unit guerrilla warfare across two terrains and two political contexts. The film was a commercial disappointment but has since been re-evaluated as one of the most disciplined American art-cinema works of its decade. Del Toro's central performance, with its absolute restraint, is among the most committed Spanish-language portrayals by an American actor.