steveo122 It's all true. HBO film about a very 'truth as strange as fiction' bit of history. No doubt details have been 'movied' but this is one astonishing true life adventure story. Antonio Banderas is very good. Too 'pretty boy', but still good. Eion Bailey plays the young director in charge of the production. Alan Arkin is quietly wonderful as always. Jim Broadbent is good as the studio head. The movie is fun; big, elaborate, ambitious, filled with convincing detail and includes several well staged battle sequences sufficiently brutal and bloody. Excellent and appropriate score.

jojo-acapulco This film is a highly interesting account of a little-known episode in the Mexican Revolution. It is as historically accurate as almost any other film biography, and better than most. In any case, it is very close to the reports John Reed published as Insurgent México in 1914.The Spanish actor Antonio Banderas does a creditable job as Mexican Pancho Villa, but for me it was sometimes hard to reconcile the face of that actor with memories of the real man, rather like watching Leonardo de Caprio do a great job playing George Washington. But movies are produced to make money, not as classroom texts, and Banderas undoubtedly sells more tickets than almost anyone else who might essay the role.Wallace Beery fit the role very well when he played Villa in 1934, but the Mexican accent was a problem and the short, stocky Stuart Erwin was cast as the tall, blond John Reed. Of today's actors, James Gandolfini would physically fit and could certainly play Pancho Villa, but he probably doesn't have the drawing power of Banderas, and the accent would be a bigger problem.

rowmorg Five for the entertainment spectacle in this TV movie that idealises Hollywood when it was not even in California and still had its studios in New Jersey, just near the investors in Wall Street. It's a cracking piece of film-making, and the pecuniary motives of the 1914 producers are frankly enough portrayed, plus the cynical motives of Wall Street financiers are mocked, if weakly. The script even admits that the studio sold out the truth in its trashy, commercialised exploitations of the Pancho Villa armed insurgency.But not another five for the deception that lies within. This film comes with the blithe implication that Hollywood could make such a film today, about insurgents rising up against the property hierarchy, when such a thing is unthinkable. If there existed before World War One a raffish romanticism about remote uprisings, and a willingness to cheek the mainstream media, that spirit is now as departed as the silent picture.It is as vanished as the archive copies of the original Pancho Villa silent-features, which were doubtless destroyed once the campesinos had been pacified and all trace of Pancho Villa, their hero, could be quietly wiped from the public record, something that happened in Mexico (and doubtless on Wall Street) as the film has the grace to admit.

Charles Herold (cherold) I was intrigued by the idea that revolutionary Pancho Villa appeared in one of the world's first docu-dramas, but not much was done with the idea. This movie could have been a satire of Hollywood's version of the truth or it could have brought Pancho Villa to life, but the movie does a little of one, a little of the other, but suffers from insisting on focusing on Thayer. Thayer comes across as too nice to fill the role of villain in a satire and too intelligent to play the role of a dupe, and he only sees Villa from the outside, unable to bring any insight to the character. There are interesting moments scattered here and there throughout the movie, and while it's bland it's watchable, I guess, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Although I will say, Alan Arkin was terrific in a small but colorful role.