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83Director Sérgio Machado, who worked as an assistant to Central Station's Walter Salles, lingers sensually over every wrong move his attractive tragic trio make.
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78Alice Braga owns this film.
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75The impressive first feature by Sergio Machado, a one-time assistant to Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries"), is a trip through a grungy world of crime, sex and cockfights.
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75Three potent performances readily compensate for the familiar plot.
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75Whatever its pretensions of social relevance, Sérgio Machado's Lower City is essentially an exploitation movie, and not a half-bad one at that.
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70Despite the lurid content, this is a beautifully made film that reaches for moral seriousness and resists facile judgments.
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70The themes are all familiar and the plot unfolds slowly and in predictable ways, but there's plenty of heat generated by the three leads.
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70Though the storyline is dirt simple and not particularly meaningful or involving, the action in this character-driven film is scintillatingly sexy.
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70Lower City is sexy, but in a nice, dirty way. Everyone in it is deliciously low and sleazy, and so underdressed in the blazing heat that they are just dying to strip.
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70In the end, Lower City is never quite as energetic as it wants to be, touched by the strange, milky lethargy that steeps every waterfront film.
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63Even though Lower City ultimately leads nowhere (the movie doesn't end so much as simply stop), you won't mind having taken the trip.
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60From its actual and figurative scenes of cockfighting to its copious use of throbbing Brazilian music, there's little here that rises above the level of formula. But director Machado displays a sure touch in his ability to convey the sultry atmosphere of his exotic setting, and he has elicited admirably naturalistic performances from his highly attractive, youthful performers.
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50Machado establishes a realistically seamy environment for his erotic triangle, and there are some surprisingly tender moments amid the squalor.
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50The story wears thin long before it's over, but Machado draws strong performances from his leads and makes excellent use of its rundown locations.
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50Everyone involved in the film seems better than the material.
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50In trying for realism, Machado only achieves dramatic inertness.
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50This frenetic potboiler about a love triangle on the Salvador waterfront smacks of liberal slumming and bristles with faux authenticity.
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50A bone-tired tale underneath.
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50The movie turns out to be a predictable and somewhat sentimental lower-depths love triangle, but Ms. Braga almost makes it work.
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25Two guys panting over the same babe leads to tedium, despite a near-record number of overheated sex scenes.
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ChadS.5