Visionary!

Rating: 9/10 (23 July 2003)

Simply put this is probably the finest movie you haven't seen. After an extremely limited engagement in the states this critically acclaimed film disappeared from the few theaters that were actually showing it. The loss is ours.
CITY OF GOD is what filmmaking is all about, not escapism but involvement, immersement, and hopefully a glimmer of understanding into too often bloody and incomprehensible worlds.
The story is ostensibly about gangs in Brazil, but its about so much more than that, it's about those places that are the price for our capitalist excess, places that pay the price for our new world order, it's about friendship, and love, and beauty, and innocence and how all these things fall away. It's part Robin Hood, and part Camelot, and part the world outside our door, and it is too much the blistering truth.

Young people are ultimately what they need to be to make it till tomorrow, what adults by our ineptness, our callousness, our carelessness, or our design force them to be. "Children are man at his strongest... they abide", if there is a truth to find in the brutal and beautiful images of this film, perhaps it's in that quote from NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. City of God is not just a stunning look at one place and one time, it is a look at Palestine, and Rwanda, Columbine, and Baltimore, it is all those places where our children do not just learn to kill, but learn to choose killing.

But if there is tragedy in THE CITY OF GOD, then there is also hope, and if there is ugliness there is also great beauty. It is, for such a seemingly violent movie, lushly, and lovingly photographed. It is a beautiful movie to look at, and that's part of it, part of the understanding the director(s) grants us, that in these distant slum lands where children slaughter children, there is beauty. Bone wrenching beauty, as beautiful as your child, your love, your sunset, beauty in the stories, and the striving... beauty even in the heart of horror and poverty.
CITY OF GOD tells a story yes, but more I think it pushes us out of our seats to find beauty, even in the things we've turned our backs on, because surely if Directors Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles can find beauty in the CITY OF GOD, it should be a simple matter for us to find beauty... in our cities of men. A highly recommended flick. 9/10.