A hauntingly real dive into Rio's seedy side, exploring the turf wars and drug scene of the city's worst neighborhood during the culture-rich 1970s. Beginning with an uncomfortably close look at their hopeless childhood living conditions, we see how, for many of these kids, guns and violence are literally their only chance at getting a leg up on life.

Not that they're all sympathetic victims, either: some people are just born bad. Most of them, actually, seem to prefer a short career of quick gains and tragic ends. Why slave away for fifty years, selling fish out of a rickety old cart like your parents, when you can just live fast and die young? Take the eventual warlord Li'l Dice/Li'l Z for example: a malicious orphan who discards his older friends' warnings and cuts a violent swath through the city, thugs and innocents alike, before he's old enough to shave. His brand of me-first barbarism spreads through the community like a plague, spawning countless imitators while earning fear and respect in equal measures.

Even the kids who try to make good, like the conflicted narrating photographer Rocket, dip their fingers into that drug-fueled honey jar when life gets tough. It's inescapable and, for a while, it all works out. The gangs enforce their own rules, a strict code that effectively eliminates random crime and establishes a sense of predictable normalcy for the unconnected population. It can't last forever, and it doesn't (there's an intense, if fleeting, power vacuum after the two bigwigs finally settle their score), but for a time that senseless chaos somehow produces its own twisted sense of order.

Cruel and unflinching, with an appropriately frantic visual character, _City of God_ swings with power. It'll touch you and hurt you, attract and repulse, and ultimately stick in your gut for days.