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Directed by Oliver Stone (and co-directed by Rob Wilson), the 90-minute political portrait “Lula” covers a vast amount of historical and contemporary ground. However, despite its handful of rousing moments, the documentary — about Brazil’s current pro-worker president, Lula da Silva — comes from a limited perspective that prevents a fuller examination of the man, his myth and the people who believe in him.

The film is constantly torn between holding U.S. policy to account for decades of interference on South American governments and coming at Lula’s story primarily from a U.S. perspective. Stone, whose sit-down interview with Lula forms the movie’s narrative launchpad, is a mildly inquisitive and happily reverential on-screen interviewer — he clearly admires Lula, perhaps to a fault — but his blinkered understanding of his own subject matter shackles the movie to surface-level readings of Brazilian politics and of the various left-wing Latin American labor...