One of the slickest movies you'll ever see

Rating: 9/10 (29 March 2012)

A mixture of Tarantino-esque narrative play, a fast-paced plot, and the talented direction of Meirelles and Lund make this an intoxicating crime drama that's almost impossible to stop watching. It's a movie about cyclical violence and the degradation of poverty in Brazil, but for all that it's fun to watch -- the characters are catchy if not particularly deep, and the crime is aesthetically pleasing at the same time as it never lets us forget the horror and evil of the violence we're watching.
I'm slightly less certain as to whether the film stays with me after that initial rush of sensation, but I think it's worth thinking about as much as it is watching. Admittedly, the characters are sketched very thinly (with the female characters being especially egregious), but the overall arc of the story -- the kind of innocent, fooling-around crime in the first part of the movie slowly giving way to more violent gang crime and eventually urban warfare -- is something that works as both social commentary and a powerful, personal narrative arc. City of God may not be the perfect film that many of its fans claim it to be, but it's that rare film that's enjoyable regardless of whether or not you have your brain on.