Though a lesser artist than the more politically astute and genuinely socialist John Sayles, Oliver Stone is one of the few committed men of the left working in mainstream American cinema. A couple of years back he gave the kid gloves treatment to Fidel Castro in a couple of documentaries, and in this far-too-short movie he travels around Latin America interviewing seven democratically elected leftwing leaders: Venezuela's Hugo Chávez (who gets the lion's share of the running time), Bolivia's Evo Morales, Argentina's Cristina Kirchner (along with her husband, former president Néstor Kirchner), Brazil's Lula da Silva, Cuba's Raúl Castro, Ecuador's Rafael Correa, and Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, a liberation theologian and former bishop.

Stone looks like a benign version of Conrad Black, and his superficial movie is a healthy corrective to the coverage of Latin America in most of the North American media, especially the toxic bile spewed out by Fox News. The interviewees come across as immensely likeable, which is the object of the exercise, and several speak of a return to the era of goodwill that Franklin Roosevelt tried to create. Over the final credits there's a performance of the 1940 hit song "South American Way", sung by Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda in Down Argentine Way, a Betty Grable vehicle made by 20th Century Fox to help further Roosevelt's "Good Neighbour" policy.