All in all, Evita is worth your time and money.

It's just a sluggish, contradictory mess, a drably "realistic" Latin-revolution music video driven by a soundtrack of mediocre '70s rock.

With one of the most dazzling screen chassis in years, Evita is definitely worth a look -- maybe even two. But don't look under the hood.

In the end, Madonna’s performance helps save Evita from being the irrelevancy it might have been and transforms it, instead, into something very much alive and strangely moving.