"City of God" boasts one of the most disturbing images ever put on film. Li'l Dice, a boy not even past puberty, is shooting at people who've been tied up after a robbery like monkeys in a barrel. His facial expression indicates nothing but pleasure. That he grows up to become an uglier and more trigger-happy Michael Corleone is not necessarily surprising.

But as "City" makes clear in a clever piece of dialogue, "Why are you calling me godfather? I didn't baptize you." Indeed, the film is much closer to Scorsese's "Goodfellas," a crime movie that doesn't ask for forgiveness. But instead of the thirty-somethings portrayed by Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci, "City" features mainly a cast of adolescents who rule the streets with the gritty realism of Mira Nair's "Salaam Bombay." Like that film, the actors were plucked from the streets to play themselves and improvise the dialogue. And like that film, the product is a cinematic gem.

It's hard to say what the story is because the film is divided into separate stories that span across generations and decades. They all center on Brazil's infamous housing projects, the favelas, where cops visit at will to round up usual suspects. The film is about a particular community, the City of God, and how crime is this community's dominant religion. Comparisons to the fractured stories in "Pulp Fiction" are worthy ("City" is also distributed by Tarantino's studio of choice Miramax). The film is like one big puzzle coming together piece by piece, and the narrator even bothers to tell the viewer to wait for a character's story, as if telling it too soon would crumble the delicate house of cards. In one episode, the entire history of an apartment is shown leading into the present story with characters and stories bursting at the seams. The pleasures of watching what is mostly based on fact may elicit joy, albeit one more tasteful than Li'l Dice's.

The narrator is Rocket, who lives under the shadow of crime (his brother was a hood) but has aspirations to become a photographer. The film pauses with Trauffaut-esque snapshots and has a journalistic, documentary quality to it. The camera work is kinetic, and the editing is crisp as if to hug the boisterous Brazilian funk beats permeating the score. While "Salaam Bombay" was melancholy, "City" is vibrant and seductive.

Another film comparison of note is Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," a similar tale of young adults with a taste for ultraviolence. But "City" rises above the Scorsese, Tarantino, Kubrick, Traffaut and Nair I've just mentioned and comes away with something uniquely Brazilian and uniquely cinematic, not an homage but rather an expansive exploration full of style. It's funny, sad, horrifying, and never dull. There's more character and story in "City" than in ten bad films.
-Howard Ho