“El Día Que Me Quieras (The Day You’ll Love Me)” is one of two movies at the Film Forum that profess to examine the power of photographic images, in this case Freddy Alborta’s 1967 picture of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s corpse surrounded by Bolivian soldiers. The film is 30 minutes of necrophiliac devotion in which the camera repeatedly pans over the famous picture and others taken by Alborta at the same time. These shots are interspersed with an interview with Alborta, who comes across as a competent professional photojournalist doing his job. He says he was not aware in framing his picture of Andrea Mantegna’s painting “The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ” or of Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp,” both of which use a similar perspective.

“El Día Que Me Quieras” is also interspersed with pictures of Bolivian peasants carrying red banners and parading somewhat aimlessly around the countryside. These were evidently staged by Leandro Katz, the film’s director, to suggest some affinity between the Bolivians and Guevara. This is wrong. Guevara arrived in Bolivia after botching his attempt to ferment communist revolution in Central Africa and leaving his trademark pile of corpses behind. He did not realize that the peasants in the area he infiltrated were relatively content with the military dictatorship then in power because new roads built in their region had greatly improved their lives. At any rate, they were semi-literate peasants who wanted nothing to do with a hip big-city Argentine trying to persuade them to risk their lives for some cockamamie revolution. He was a nuisance; they turned him in for the reward.

The film says Guevara was executed by the CIA and the Bolivian military. I have seen an interview with the CIA agent who was allowed by the Bolivians to interrogate Guevara after his capture. He says the CIA asked the Bolivians not to kill Guevara. This is plausible because a live Che might have had interesting things to say, but a dead Che is of value only to people like Katz, who play him as a martyr. Despicable.

“Looking for an Icon,” the second film, is the work of two Dutch directors, Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman. It examines four well-known photographs that were winners of the “World Press Photo of the Year” competition. These are Eddie Adams’s 1969 picture of Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong guerrilla, an anonymous 1973 picture thought to be the last photo of Chilean president Salvador Allende alive, Charlie Cole’s 1989 picture of a lone Chinese protester stopping a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square, and David Turnley’s picture from the 1991 Gulf War of a young American sergeant at the moment he learns the body bag next to him contains the body of his friend. The film includes interviews with photojournalists, editors, and academics and has some interesting footage, but is ideologically biased and sophomoric.

The movie notes that Addams befriended Loan, and later tried to help him as the general’s life in America was repeatedly blighted when he was identified as the executioner in the famous picture. The movie says Addams was a supporter of the Vietnam War and makes it seem that, naturally, anyone so inclined would condone extrajudicial killings. The movie does not say the Vietcong infiltrator had that morning killed a friend and neighbor of Loan’s, murdering the wife and six children with a knife. I do not mean here to condone Loan’s act, or Addams’s support for him, but withholding this information deprives the picture of some of its available meaning. It is lying by omission.

Salvador Allende is identified by the filmmakers as a “dead martyr” who was “assassinated.” If Che Guevara was, as I suggested in a 2005 article about him, the Inspector Clouseau of revolution, Allende was Mr. Magoo as el presidente. Be that as it may, he was not assassinated, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Fidel Castro, which had on it a golden plate engraved, “To my good friend Salvador from Fidel, who by different means tries to achieve the same goals.”

David Levi Strauss, a photography critic, says in one of the film’s interviews: “Images bury history. There’s a way that once an image becomes an icon and is activated, it’s the truth, whatever … whatever else people come later to say about it.” That seems unnecessarily postmodern, and I for one do not believe it.

Tomorrow through May 22 (209 W. Houston St., between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue, 212-627-2035).