Antonio Banderas, Eion Bailey, Alan Arkin

In 1914, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (Antonio Banderas) finds himself without adequate funding to finance his war against the military-run government. He also finds himself at odds with the Ame...( read more  read more... )ricans because of the Hearst media empire's press campaign against him. To counter both of these, he sends emissaries to movie producers to convince them to pay to film his progress and the actual battles. Producer D.W. Griffith (Colm Feore) becomes interested and sends Frank Thayer (Eion Bailey) with a film crew to develop film reels. Thayer becomes horrified and fascinated by the bandit. He finds an enigmatic individual that is both ghoulishly brutal and charmingly captivating. They become very close and along months, Frank makes the first feature five reels length movie, "The Life of General Villa", when the usual was two reels only. After edition, another reality about Pancho Villa is screened for the audience. The resulting film became the first feature length movie, introducing scores of Americans to the true horrors of war that they had never personally seen. Thayer sold the studios on making the film despite their concerns that no one would sit through a movie longer than 1 hour by convincing them that they could raise the price of movies to ten cents, doubling the going price at that time.

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50% liked it

533 ratings

Unrated

Directed by: Bruce Beresford

Release Date: December 31, 2003

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DVD Release Date: December 27, 2005

Stats: 42 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (42)


  • March 16, 2008
    Interesting biopic, well acted by Banderras. Not a classic by any means but worth a couple hours of your time.
  • April 10, 2009
    Pretty average portrayal, Well I know nothing about its historical accuracies so I can't judge
  • February 24, 2009
    well, dont wanna see another bio-film by hollywood, and also, antonio banderas doesn´t looks like pancho villa
  • July 16, 2008
    Very memorable. Viva La Revolucion !!!!
  • February 15, 2008
    I thoroughly enjoyed this. I guess there is a bit of a historical thing going on here and there will always be an argument about whether this man was a hero or a tyrant.
    I felt it was a good watch.
  • November 18, 2007
    Enjoyable movie with great production value. Eion Bailey could have a promising career; losing out to Christian Bale for the role of Batman isn't the best of luck, but it's an honor just to be considered, right?

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