City of God

The subtractive test bites at the edges and not at the centre. The chain of deaths is tight, and each is paid for by an earlier one: Marreco killed by the boy Dadinho; the motel robbery told first without its killer and later with him; Zé’s rape of Mané’s girlfriend, which turns a bus conductor into a soldier; the boy Otto, whose father Mané killed in a bank robbery, killing Mané; the Runts killing Zé. What gives is the novel’s sprawl, kept in. The history of one apartment passing through many hands is a set piece the argument does not require; Rocket’s sexual comedy and his job at the newspaper run longer than the frame they carry; several middle killings repeat a point already made.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a housing estate built by the state to move the poor out of sight becomes, in twenty years, a sovereignty of guns governed by children, where the police are a rival gang with a salary and the only exits are a camera or a grave. The film shows the drug trade as a business with a succession, and the succession reproducing itself. The scene in which Zé makes a small boy shoot one of two children discloses how the order recruits. Held below the gate because the account is a mechanism seen from inside its violence, leaving out the women, the workers and the churches of the estate, and because the charge that it makes the favela a spectacle for outsiders has weight.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation is frequent and mostly kinetic, rarely transporting. It rises with the chicken breaking loose and the camera running at its height through the alleys; with the circling shot that turns the street back to the sixties; with the Tender Trio robbing a gas truck under a low sun while the poor fill their pans; with Bené’s farewell party under strobe light, where the shot meant for Zé kills the one man who had chosen to leave. The dread of the motel retold and of the hand-or-foot scene is real. Held at the figure because the register is exhilaration more than grandeur: score and cutting push a rush that is often the same rush, and the film rarely stops long enough for awe or grief to open.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The title carries the largest myth, and the film builds on it only in part: a City of God that is Augustine’s earthly city, a place of domination from which God is absent. The archetypes present are real: the boy who becomes a king by murder and renames himself; the friend killed on the night of leaving; the just man who takes up the sword and becomes what he fought; the child avenger; the witness who survives by looking. The fall of Mané Galinha is built, not cited, and it is the film’s deepest pattern. Held below the gate because these are the gangster film’s inherited types, reaching it through Scarface and Goodfellas, and the particular is more often vivid than archetypal.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The inheritance is plain: the American gangster chronicle, Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) above all, with its narrator, freeze frames and decades told as a career; the chaptered, looping telling of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994); the advertising and music-video cutting in which Meirelles had worked; and at home the Cinema Novo tradition of the poor on screen and Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1981). The turn is real: that language carried into a Brazilian housing estate, told from inside by a cast largely from such places. So was the stake, a large Brazilian production with almost no stars on a subject the market had little appetite for. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the means were borrowed whole, and the departure carries a proven form to a new world rather than making a new form.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The narrator is a minor character and a survivor, so the history is a witness’s: Rocket knows the story because he could not leave it and was never at its centre. The loops, the motel told twice, the apartment’s chain of owners, the prologue returned to, make the estate’s history a set of stories passing through the same places and objects, as property and guns pass through the same hands. The change of grade and camera across three periods makes the decline visible as a change of air, the knowledge that the order hardened by stages. Held below the top: the chaptered narrator is inherited grammar, used very well, and parts of the form are style laid over the content.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Twenty-four years is short evidence, and the axis is weighed on it. The questions that have stayed open are real: whether the film’s style makes the favela a spectacle for outside eyes; what it owes, and what it takes, from the people it cast and their places; what its silence about the estate’s ordinary life means; how it stands to Paulo Lins’s much larger novel. Formally it yields on return, in the rhymes of chicken and boy, camera and gun, and in the planting of Otto. Held at the figure because most of the writing is on its style and its politics rather than new readings of its meaning, and because its pleasures are largely those of momentum, which repeat rather than deepen on a second viewing.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Field: the cinema of the 2000s, and since the film was released in 2002, force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: it showed that the American gangster chronicle could be carried whole and at full speed into the poor cities of the south, told from inside with a local non-professional cast, and win the world audience. It reorganised less what film could do than where and by whom. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the television series Cidade dos Homens (2002 to 2005) and its film, from the same makers; Tropa de Elite (2007) and the favela film as a Brazilian genre; the slum epic abroad, Slumdog Millionaire (2008) the plainest heir; the casting workshop as a method. That reach lies largely within the crime film and its style.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole, and its restorations and remasters are repair. Its presence across twenty-four years is continuous and wide for a film not in English: in exhibition, on home video in every format and on streaming services, in the lists of best films, and in teaching on Brazil and on cinema. Twenty-four years demonstrate survival, but not over a span that would carry the axis to the gate. The surface is charged a little: the cutting, the music cues and the digital grade of the turn of the millennium already read as of their moment. It stands a tenth short of the bar, on elapsed time and that surface together.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Daniel Rezende’s editing holds three periods, a dozen principal figures and a narrator’s loops at speed without losing the line. César Charlone’s camera moves from the golden steadiness of the sixties to the handheld cold of the eighties, each period’s air exact. The direction of a largely non-professional cast is the film’s largest single achievement of craft: Leandro Firmino’s Zé and Douglas Silva’s Dadinho read as lives rather than turns. Bráulio Mantovani compresses a long novel into a clear chain. The costs fall on real shares: the cutting and the music push one rhythm too often, and some freeze frames and titles are effects for their own sake.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the sixties, the Tender Trio robbing a gas truck under a low sun and Rocket failing at a girl and at crime, and the war of about 1980, children armed by both sides and the Runts with their list. One law governs both: in the City of God whoever holds the gun holds the place, and every holder is replaced by someone younger. The comedy obeys it, since Marreco dies by it, and the apartment’s chain of owners is the same law told as a joke. The range runs from farce to massacre. The strain: Rocket’s way out through the newspaper is told under a gentler law, closer to a career picture, and the camera’s pleasure in its own speed sits uneasily at times with what it shows.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Several orders are held in one structure. The state, in the housing policy that made the estate and the police who tax it. The economy, in the drug trade as a business with suppliers, territories, payroll and succession. The family, in brothers, a father and a son, a boy’s revenge. Childhood, as the trade’s labour force. History, in twenty years of one place. The press, in the newspaper that prints Zé’s picture and gives Rocket a way out. Consciousness, in Rocket’s narration. The plot joins them: Otto’s revenge and the Runts’ rise are the economy and the family in one act. What holds the axis: the sacred is present only in the name, women stand at the edge, consciousness is Rocket’s alone and only its surface, and the city beyond the estate, which made it and buys from it, is barely seen.

Score: 7.8 / 10