FM4 - Urban Stories: City of God

Here are two very good reviews for 'City Of God'. They appeared in The Guardian and The Independent at the time of the films release.

'The sacrificial purpose of the chicken conveys with the force of a blunt instrument how cheap life has come to be in the ghetto, and how victimhood and aggression have become fused together. The wiseguys, their cowering subordinates, their stoic womenfolk and the dead bodies around them are all chickens - and they are mostly all children.'

'Whenever guns are waved around on screen, especially by young excitable men, critics reach for the handy term "cycle of violence", but it's rarely been so apposite as it is here. The violence in City of God is relentless and cyclical; the narrative rests on a structure in which each generation of juvenile hoods lines up to be slaughtered by the next, younger and more ruthless. Although the film has a causal plot in which one event triggers another, events in Fernando Meirelles's gang-war saga escalate so bewilderingly fast that you feel as though you're watching one of those speeded-up microscope shots of multiplying amoebae.'