For nearly two hours, Padilha bombards viewers with senseless, sickening violence for its own sake.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 19, 2008

Elite Squad is a relentlessly ugly, unpleasant, often incoherent assault on the senses from Brazil.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/5 | Sep 19, 2008

Elite Squad can't decide whether it wants to pull the lid back on what urban decay has wrought or simply open up a can of whup ass.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/6 | Sep 17, 2008

Elite Squad succeeds at putting the worst of the violent spectacles on screen, primarily through a series of nicely staged shootouts and torture sequences.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2008

[Jos Padilha] recariously pitches the squad's brute force as less a necessary evil than the outgrowth of an existing evil -- a no-win situation that mocks liberal ideals and warps conservative pragmatism into domestic terrorism.

| Sep 17, 2008

It bears a resemblance to viscerally exciting seventies urban thrillers like The French Connection, in which only the fascists could do what needed to be done.

| Sep 15, 2008

Padilha succumbs to monotonous, hollow flamboyance with his City of God clone.

| Original Score: C | Sep 2, 2008

A film that simply doesn't have enough cinematic flair to make it a better than average cops and robbers thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 8, 2008

Padilha gets as close to the daily violence as City of God, though this feels more like a documentary than an epic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 8, 2008

Padilha's style, honed in his hijack documentary Bus 174, is verismo with a vengeance. For two hours the viewer feels as hand-held as the camera, hauled about by the neck.

| Aug 8, 2008

It's just a pity the story is so slipshod - it only really gets going halfway through.

| Aug 8, 2008

Here is the biggest, fattest, dampest squib of the week: perhaps the most disappointing film ever to have won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 8, 2008

Nascimento's penchant for Rambo theatrics is unfortunate, because elsewhere Elite Squad has interesting things to say.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 8, 2008

It is impressively made, but leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

| Original Score: 2/6 | Aug 8, 2008

Despite the voiceover, Padilha has created a shocking insight into a world in which corrupt cops slug it out against drug dealers but, ultimately, nobody wins.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 8, 2008

An instruction manual of sorts that doesn't illuminate police corruption and violence so much as it revels in it.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 21, 2008