What makes City of God so breathtaking is director Fernando Meirelles' passion for these people - he gives us the color, the music and the humor...

| Dec 30, 2019

I came away from this film impressed by its narrative control but unmoved by anything it had to say.

| Nov 8, 2011

Powerful, but only for 17 and up.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 22, 2010

City of God delivers a bruising, visceral experience of the vicious spiral of violence that draws kids into a life of crime, brutality and murder as the only avenue open to them.

| Jun 17, 2009

The performances, many from non-pros, are terrific.

| Jun 24, 2006

Difficult to watch but hard to look away from.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 19, 2004

The living conditions it projects are as horrendous as I had feared, but the movie is surprisingly easy to take as a rollicking homicidal entertainment.

| Mar 11, 2004

A blood-spattered, non-stop ride as much into the life of a 'favela' (squatter settlement) as it is into the lives of the youths who inhabit it.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Dec 20, 2003

A dynamic masterpiece in any language.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 20, 2003

Watching the humanity in the city slowly crumble as poverty and degradation slowly take over, I couldn't shake the growing lump in my stomach as it hardened into a dry, cold clump.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 19, 2003

It's a conspicuously stylish attention-getter that heralds the discovery of a major directorial talent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 25, 2003

It's like Scorsese meets Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, with a samba soundtrack.

| Mar 21, 2003

A marvelous achievement that refuses to avert its gaze from the poetry and the insane savagery of the hopeless.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 16, 2003

Meirelles takes us to a real-life deathtrap and then proceeds to make us feel twice as alive for the time we spend there.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 14, 2003

An incredibly assured, compelling and often sardonically funny piece of filmmaking.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Mar 7, 2003

Traffic was brilliant fiction, but City of God proves that true stories often pack the most punch.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 7, 2003

It should be considered required viewing, I think, by anyone who seeks to understand how violence begets violence.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 31, 2003

Meirelles opens with a stark image -- close-up of a knife sharpened on a whetting stone -- and, for the rest of the film, pretty much keeps us on that knife's edge.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 31, 2003

Meirelles has created one of the most startling, grittily brilliant films in recent years.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2003

If one of the moral responsibilities of the movies is to put you in places where you'd never go and live lives you'd never live, then City of God is great moviemaking.

| Jan 24, 2003