We know the massacre is going to happen from the off, and yet, despite this, the tension doesn't build much, perhaps because the film is over-long.

| Jan 9, 2018

We're served up meaty, often spicy, slices of sadly wasted lives.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2004

It has the resonant feel of myth, buoyed by simultaneously vicious and compassionate performances from the men on both sides of the bars.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 1, 2004

The movie has a tactile reality. You can almost smell it.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 15, 2004

Has moments of raw, unflinching power.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 30, 2004

Despite its structural flaws, Carandiru presents more interesting characters than you'd see in a dozen other prison movies.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 11, 2004

Babenco brings the place and the prisoners alive.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 11, 2004

The two-part structure feels inescapably manipulative.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 11, 2004

It is Carandiru's ability to humanize its central characters -- to make you care about the murderers, thieves, junkies and whores who are Carandiru's citizens, and its doomed heroes -- that gives the movie its wrenching, tragic power.

| Jun 4, 2004

We come to like [the characters], to respect their yearning for redemption, which is why the ending is so powerful.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jun 4, 2004

Babenco's side trips into the prisoners' lives give the movie a complicated integrity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 4, 2004

As a 2 1/2-hour sentence to the graybar hotel, the movie can't be topped.

| Jun 4, 2004

Searing and hypnotic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 3, 2004

Carandiru is no typical prison movie. And that's a good thing.

| Jun 3, 2004

It shows 8,000 men jammed into space meant for 4,000, and enforcing their own laws in a place their society has abandoned.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 28, 2004

Babenco weaves the stories of a dozen inmates into a densely textured fabric, capturing the feel of a closed society whose members have lost their freedom yet still maintain a tenuous grip on their humanity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 28, 2004

An urgent piece of cinema -- a shiv in the ribs and right cross to the chin -- that's also a salutation to human solidarity and the will to live.

| Original Score: A- | May 27, 2004

After watching Carandiru, one recalls the movie's inmates with sadness, the doctor with affection, the prison with fear and loathing and the movie with that sure, strong recognition you feel after seeing, for the first time, a classic.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | May 27, 2004

Babenco has fashioned his film without polemic intent but with all the art at his command, which is considerable.

Full Review | May 26, 2004

One might expect a dreary, depressing film, and to an extent it is, but there are many flashes of lightness, not of humor so much as of simple human vividness, which keeps challenging us to see the prisoners as individuals.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 21, 2004