These passages are interesting but mistaken. The boys glorify violence, but the movie doesn't. The narrator is someone who never participates directly in the violence, and whose aim is to get out of the favela and become a professional photographer, which he succeeds in doing. He is an insider, but he has detachment too. I see no evidence of a "glib tone": there's simply the enthusiasm and affection of anyone describing the colorful surroundings of his youth, and the economy and rapidity necessary to a narrator who has a lot to tell. That doesn't equal "glib." The "carnage" is perhaps briefly glamorous for the participants, for a while anyway, but that doesn't mean that the movie itself "glamorizes" that "carnage." It's obvious that the person who produces the most carnage, Lil' Dice AKA Lil' Zee, is a very sick guy from an early age.

The Chicago Reader passage contradicts itself: first it accuses City of God of "using the exoticism of a location in place of star power," then it says the movie has "no precise reference to contemporary Brazil." How can it be making a great use of location, and ignoring location? City of God is obviously profoundly steeped in its location, and that location is contemporary Brazil: it is madness or blindness not to see that. City of God "invites us to contemplate from a safe distance," the Chicago Reader says? Nonsense! We're in the thick of the action from start to finish. What kind of "safe distance" is this? This writer is seeing another movie in his head. "Mythologizing" and "romanticizing"? How so? Again, perhaps briefly for the participants there is this quality, but not from the viewers' point of view.

This idea that City of God lacks moral clarity seems to be belied by the fact that the new president of Brazil has pointed to it as showing a reality that people need to know about and deal with. I think what you and these writers really mean is that there is no heavy moralizing in the movie. It leaves you to make your moral judgments for yourself. And what are they? That it's wrong to kill people? That boys of twelve oughtn't to have guns? Is that really something we need to be told? Heavy moralizing is unnecessary. The events speak for themselves just as in any good documentary they do. City of God is really quite realistic, and the picture it paints is anything but pretty.

A film that is a particularly rich social document can always be read in a variety of ways. What does The Battle of Algiers mean?