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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (79) | Top Critics (27) | Fresh (77) | Rotten (2) | DVD (2)
A tense documentary with multiple layers of meaning.
Padilha allows neither easy answers nor ironic commentary, producing on both sides of the conflict a world of inconsolable grief.
Slightly overlong for overseas audiences, José Padilha's film (co-directed by editor Felipe Lacerda) makes it crystal clear why this incident proved so traumatic for many Brazilians.
This smart, absorbing movie, which has been sharply edited by Felipe Lacerda, never feels like it's spreading itself too thin.
An extraordinary portrait of a life lived always in the shadow of despair.
Interviews, images and events accumulate, driving the story to its sad end with the implacable momentum of a Greek tragedy.
Building an indictment of the media, the police, and the provincial governor for placing self-interest above saving lives, Bus 174 opens out from the people directly involved in the incident to an examination of institutionalized poverty.
Relentlessly gripping.
Masterful.
Much more troubling than any fiction...
Padilha lays out the story with a crusader's fury while remaining careful not to slight the testimony or the suffering of Sandro's hostages.
If City Of God cracked the skin, Bus 174 digs deep into the wound. An astounding, depressing triumph.
An always gripping, harrowing and thought-provoking documentary that dives deep into an open sore of Brazilian society and exposes some of the most terrible social issues that have been driving out of control a city dominated by violence and indifference.
Super Reviewer
The intentions behind making this documentary might be good (i.e. achieving an award :p), but it moves very briskly. The more-than-often-repeated threat by the hijacker to "Set the heat up" made my blood boil. Guess his vocabulary was limited. The documentary is bearable otherwise. And even if the documentary was made with pure intentions, I wonder how long will its message last (assuming that it's not being conveyed to deaf ears), if at all it does.
A brilliant film that sends shivers down the spine..not in terms of the hostage taking but in terms of the prisons and society that the hostage taker endured. A real gem.
[font=Century Gothic][color=royalblue]"Bus 174" is a Brazilian documentary about a hostage crisis in a city bus in Rio de Janeiro in 2000. Several people were held hostage by a street person, Sandro do Nascimento. The police due to a lack of funding and training do not do a very good job of containing the scene, so the media's cameras get a lot closer to the scene than would normally happen. Luckily, the makers of this excellent documentary, Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda, have bigger things on their mind than making a sensationalist film. By using Nascimento as a sample case study, they examine the precarious state of street people in Brazil and some of their individual histories. The prisons of Brazil are shown to be brutal hellholes but the police hesitate when at the scene of the hostage crisis. Which goes to show that the police may act a completely different way when there are other people watching them. [/color][/font]
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