I will read your review again whenever I want to incite my memory of this technical and narrative marvel. CITY OF GOD will likely sneak into my Top 10 by year's end on formal merits alone. My joy is tempered though by ethical concerns. The problem is not the depiction of violence per se but the glorification of it and the lack of a socio-political dimension. The characters in say..."Goodfellas" or "Pulp Fiction" are adults who made lifestyle choices. The hopeless favela youths are trapped in a cage, forced to fight for our amusement like the dogs in "Amores Perros".The film has no time to explore how and who put them there. The film has no time to show the crying mamas and the gravediggers. It's rushing to the next masterly shot massacre. Tell me CoG is not exploitative. Tell me the little kid's tears were fake, when Zee insists one of "the runts"gets shot.

Nowadays movies everywhere seem to be following the American mainstream, often using the exoticism of a location in place of star power. City of God is well scripted, fast, exploitative and cynical-like most gangster movies. The violence is overwhelming but the carnage is glamorized. With no precise reference to contemporary Brazil, the film invites us to contemplate from a safe distance, the terrible life of the slums, where poor people apparently kill each other with natural grace and wit The Chicago Reader

What City of God is missing that these great pictures(Bunuel's LOS OLVIDADOS and Babenco's PIXOTE) have is the sort of moral clarity and political focus that make for lasting emotional impact. City is shocking but not moving, at least not in proportion to its subject. The narrator speaks in a glib tone that adds unwelcome irony to a story that should move us to tears. There is a dangerous mythologizing of these young gangsters, a romanticizing of their camaraderie, and above all, a lack of any outsider's p.o.v., if only to add definition to the horrors on screen The San Francisco Chronicle