Cidade de Deus (City of God) Reviews

The visceral and artistic excitement remains surface-bound.

Full Review | Original Score: C

The direction is often inspired and sure-handed, even if it's sometimes unfocused or overambitious.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

I came out of the theater feeling lucky to be alive.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Finally more numbing than emotionally shattering.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

There's something distasteful in the rote way this film introduces us to two dozen hapless, heartless kids and doesn't care enough to make us feel for them.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

I came away from this film impressed by its narrative control but unmoved by anything it had to say.

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Incredible editing, but leaves an awful taste in my mouth - and I am totally desensitized to violence!

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

Meirelles' message is important, but the telling quickly becomes monotonous.

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Meirelles plays to the crowd, plays everything for effect, which wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the subject didn't deserve greater intellectual seriousness.

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A well-made but pointless picture, it is a non-stop orgy of senseless violence, as teens and preteens slaughter each other like animals.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

The film is as slick as any Hollywood thriller ... that dilute the impact of what might have been an indelible cautionary tale.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

The distinction between the depiction of violence and its exploitation is paper-thin.

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The question of the picture isn't what to do with the City of God, but really why do anything when such cool movies can be made from its suffering.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

The horrific images of children shooting children don't sit well with a tone of jaded irony, and the grinding nightmare of poverty and crime resists Cidade de Deus's playful generic conventions.

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A Brazilian "Scarface"

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With few exceptions, real slum kids and actors from local amateur drama clubs were cast in City of God, and the result is truly believable characters and a gritty, realistic film.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

For all their straddling of the line between realism and exploitation, entertainment and education, it's entirely possible that Meirelles and Lund render that line invisible.

| Original Score: 4/5

Hard to watch but even harder to tear your eyes away from.

| Original Score: 5/5

"City of God" is a movie that, for the lack of a better term, incites us. It elicits a response. It pounds away at us until we break...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

It is certainly one of the best movies of the year; it may even be as good as Meirelles imagined it could be.

Full Review | Original Score: A

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