City of God Review

The opening chicken chase is a thesis statement: knives, samba, a bird sprinting for its life, and a boy caught between the gang and the police, held on a whip pan that the film will return to two hours later having earned it. Meirelles and Katia Lund braid roughly twenty years of Cidade de Deus history through Rocket's narration, breaking off into chaptered digressions like the Story of the Apartment, which compresses a decade of tenants into three minutes of dissolves.

Cesar Charlone shoots on the run, saturated gold bleaching toward white, snap zooms and handheld reframes that make the geography feel improvised even though every route is mapped. The cast came largely from the favelas themselves, and it shows in the rhythm of the talk, overlapping and unwritten-sounding. Li'l Ze's escalation is charted with terrifying economy, ending in the Runts, children handed pistols because the older ones are dead. The style occasionally aestheticizes what it means to indict, and the dialogue leans on narration to carry transitions. It still moves like nothing else from its decade.