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100Breathtaking and terrifying, urgently involved with its characters, it announces a new director of great gifts and passions: Fernando Meirelles.
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100Like a bomb exploding in a fireworks factory: It's fierce and shocking and dazzling and wonderful.
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100One of the most uncompromisingly bleak films I've ever seen.
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100A visual and aural feast that combines elements of classic gangster melodramas, crime epics such as "The Godfather" and playful non-linear narratives such as "Amores Perros," City of God explores a deadly culture while feeling more alive than anything that's hit the big screen in years.
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100Meticulous in its descriptions of well-intended individuals caught up in these ferocious waves of street crime.
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100A marvelous achievement that refuses to avert its gaze from the poetry and the insane savagery of the hopeless.
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100An exhilarating slap in the face, bracing and sexy, smart and visceral, stylish and raw -- the advent of a fabulously exciting new moviemaking talent.
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100The film finds a surprising amount of tenderness and humor beneath the brutality. The laughs may catch in the throat, but that's only a byproduct of City Of God's power to leave viewers breathless.
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100The film is seductive, disturbing, enthralling -- a trip to hell that gives the passengers a great ride.
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100It's a trip to Hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be.
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100One of the most startling, grittily brilliant films in recent years.
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90Emotionally gripping from start to finish, the movie presents an electrifying and unforgettable look at life in a place that God has all but forgotten.
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90As the movie's frenetic visual rhythms and mood swings synchronize with the zany, adrenaline-fueled impulsiveness of its lost youth on the rampage, you may find yourself getting lost in this teeming netherworld.
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88An epic docudrama - electric and raw.
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88This is one movie in which you don't feel the long-ish running time, in part because there always seems to be a surprise (as well as a new street guerrilla) around every corner.
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88Despite the grim, serious nature of the subject matter, Meirelles unearths occasional moments of humor, although they are often of the gallows variety.
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83Undeniably powerful, the work also comes with its own built-in shield against feeling any one character's difficulties too deeply, or for too long.
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80A tightly woven tapestry of extraordinary breadth, and director Fernando Meirelles's control over the material is extraordinary.
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75For those who didn't get enough violence from Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York," welcome to City of God.
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Brutal, tough to watch but impossible to ignore.
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75In God's ghetto, as in so many of the world's forsaken places, warring armies of infants brandish their weapons of self-destruction, while politicians bluster and inspectors sleep.
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70Nothing if not confrontational.
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70It's sensationally well-made: skittery and kinetic, packed with mayhem, yet framed (and narrated) with witty detachment, so that the carnage never seems garish. The film is far from a work of art, but it marks the emergence of a great new action superchef.
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70The impressive filmmaking craftsmanship and sharp storytelling skills make this two-hour-plus epic fly by.
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Predictably, the violence is overwhelming. But the massacres are glamorized, and the characters look like they're posing for tourism posters.
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67It takes a strong stomach to sit through its two-plus hours of non-stop brutality (much of it involving very small children).
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63A razzle-dazzle lower-depths melodrama.
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60But if City of God whirs with energy for nearly its full 130-minute running time, it is oddly lacking in emotional heft for a work that aspires to the epic -- it is essentially a tarted-up exploitation picture whose business is to make ghastly things fun.
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60A potent and unexpected mixture of authenticity and flash -- even if this is what happened on the ground, making it worth our time on screen is just beyond the contortionist abilities of even this most acrobatic of films.
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60Meirelles's picture is so keen to brandish its social wrath, and its spirits are so rampagingly high, that the bruises it inflicts barely last a night. [20 January 2003, p. 94]
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50In its cinematic approach, though, the film is as slick as any Hollywood thriller, directed by Fernando Meirelles with visual flourishes - jazzy editing, lurid colors, crackling sound effects - that dilute the impact of what might have been an indelible cautionary tale.
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50Full of action, but no soul.
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50Undeniably powerful, but also rather numbing.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 74 out of 82
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Mixed: 4 out of 82
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Negative: 4 out of 82
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