| 100 |
Time
Richard Corliss
The film is seductive, disturbing, enthralling -- a trip to hell that gives the passengers a great ride.
|
| 100 |
New York Post
Megan Lehmann
Like a bomb exploding in a fireworks factory: It's fierce and shocking and dazzling and wonderful.
|
| 100 |
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
A marvelous achievement that refuses to avert its gaze from the poetry and the insane savagery of the hopeless.
|
| 100 |
Film Threat
K.J. Doughton
Meticulous in its descriptions of well-intended individuals caught up in these ferocious waves of street crime.
|
| 100 |
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
An exhilarating slap in the face, bracing and sexy, smart and visceral, stylish and raw -- the advent of a fabulously exciting new moviemaking talent.
|
| 100 |
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
One of the most uncompromisingly bleak films I've ever seen.
|
| 100 |
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
It's a trip to Hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be.
|
| 100 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Keith Phipps
The 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.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Breathtaking and terrifying, urgently involved with its characters, it announces a new director of great gifts and passions: Fernando Meirelles.
|
| 100 |
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
One of the most startling, grittily brilliant films in recent years.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
Mark Caro
A 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.
|
| 90 |
Dallas Observer
Jean Oppenheimer
Emotionally gripping from start to finish, the movie presents an electrifying and unforgettable look at life in a place that God has all but forgotten.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
Stephen Holden
As 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.
|
| 88 |
USA Today
Mike Clark
This 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.
|
| 88 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
An epic docudrama - electric and raw.
|
| 88 |
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Despite the grim, serious nature of the subject matter, Meirelles unearths occasional moments of humor, although they are often of the gallows variety.
|
| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Undeniably powerful, the work also comes with its own built-in shield against feeling any one character's difficulties too deeply, or for too long.
|
| 80 |
TV Guide
Ken Fox
A tightly woven tapestry of extraordinary breadth, and director Fernando Meirelles's control over the material is extraordinary.
|
| 75 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
In 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.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
For those who didn't get enough violence from Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York," welcome to City of God.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Octavio Roca
Brutal, tough to watch but impossible to ignore.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
Staff (not credited)
Predictably, the violence is overwhelming. But the massacres are glamorized, and the characters look like they're posing for tourism posters.
|
| 70 |
Village Voice
Michael Atkinson
Nothing if not confrontational.
|
| 70 |
Slate
David Edelstein
It'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.
|
| 70 |
Variety
David Rooney
The impressive filmmaking craftsmanship and sharp storytelling skills make this two-hour-plus epic fly by.
|
| 67 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
It takes a strong stomach to sit through its two-plus hours of non-stop brutality (much of it involving very small children).
|
| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
A razzle-dazzle lower-depths melodrama.
|
| 60 |
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
A 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.
|
| 60 |
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
Meirelles'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]
|
| 60 |
LA Weekly
John Powers
But 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.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
In 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.
|
| 50 |
New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
Undeniably powerful, but also rather numbing.
|
| 50 |
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
Full of action, but no soul.
|
