I will begin by admitting that I'm deeply attracted to the star of this film, Edgar Ramirez. He is a Venezuelan who seems to speak every major European language fluently. In 2010, he starred in Olivier Assayas's French miniseries Carlos. In the 2013 film The Liberator (directed by Alberto Arvelo), he is much like the character he played in Assayas's biopic of Carlos the Jackal (another Venezuelan): intelligent, worldly, but a man of action. And this is what I find so attractive in this actor: Words are as important to him as movement. Despite the super-fast pace of The Liberator, which is about the rise and fall of the 19th-century South American warrior and anti-colonist Simón Bolívar, Ramirez always finds a way to give his words and moments weight. He seems unrushed in a film that's speeding through 30 years of a great man's life: his aristocratic upbringing, his time in a Spanish court, his first love, her death, his return to Europe, his gambling, his big change, his dancing with black slaves, his revolution against the Spaniards, his major battles, his victory, and, finally, the betrayal. The camera sweeps across battlefields, rushes through halls, swirls in rooms, and yet Ramirez never loses his balance, his sense of ground. I love this man.