As real as it gets

Rating: Null/10 (29 September 2007)

City of God is a fantastically made film filled with memorable characters all mixed into a story that will hold your attention from beginning to end. There's seriously not much wrong with this movie at all and has some of the best performances I've seen to date in modern cinema. Fernando Meirelles certainly makes his mark here, creating a realistically brutal rendition of a true story based around a violent neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro in the 60's and 70's.
I don't know if such ties have been mentioned before but this movie reminded me very much of The Godfather movies, filled with violence, crime, drugs and money with each gang trying to survive or gain a bigger slice of the pie. The one major difference between this and the Godfather however is that the main theme here is simply that these people have been made to live like this. It is their conditioning, and usually not always is it a choice for such people to make such choices. This theme is recurrent throughout the film and is poignantly displayed with great effect with every bullet that is fired.
Although obviously not as grand as such movies, City of God nevertheless does its job brilliantly, building up characters with a perfect pace and balancing the plot all the while so that things don't slow down beyond interest. Perhaps what the film does best however is depict the nature of disorder and corruption to a degree only someone with direct experience could do. Throughout the film I did feel like I was watching real events take place, never feeling like I was watching a scripted movie, and I have to say, every few films achieve this with me. This is probably why I have so little to say about the movie! I also have another theory that the best movies need fewer lines to review than the bad ones. Or more accurately, the best films cannot be reviewed well enough to do them justice. So it is simply my job to say "watch this movie and be as amazed as I was". The rating says it all.