Critic Reviews

A conventional, rather shallow up-by-your-bootstraps drama, but with a difference.

Long on hero worship and woefully short on insight, Lula: Son of Brazil oozes good intentions, but it wouldn't look out of place in a retrospective of early Soviet workerist cinema.

The screenplay by Daniel Tendler, Fernando Bonassi and Lula biographer Parana succumbs to many of the most unfortunate narrative tendencies of biopics, including a proclivity for piling on incident after incident as a substitute for real character insight.

Fábio Barreto's film is an act of hero worship, not a multifaceted exploration of a charismatic leader.

The film is more testimonial than drama.

A sense of the man himself seems absent in Fábio Barreto's portrait, however, and other than a rally scene with prescient Occupy Wall Street overtones, you're mostly left with facts, dates and iconic poses.

Forget "Son of Brazil": This syrupy origin story/biopic on the nation's beloved reformist president, whose second term ended in 2010, should be titled Mama's Boy.

This insipidly inspirational biopic of the two-term Brazilian president is a safe, bourgeois vision of proletarian struggle.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's reformist two-term president, gets the once-over-lightly treatment in Lula, Son of Brazil.