Dead End Kids on Dead End Hill, high above the beaches of Rio, a boil-down of a Brazilian TV series. Any resemblance to City of God is not strictly incidental. (Fernando Meirelles, the director of that other City, worked as co-producer on this one, directed by Paulo Morelli.) The fashion-conscious photography, colored and textured appropriately for a jeans ad, is rather at cross-purposes with the Raw Reality. And the lackadaisical narrative, picking up steam in the latter stages with the outbreak of a turf war, but concentrating at all stages on a pair of pacifistic pals (Darlan Cunha and Douglas Silva, reprising their TV roles), heads inexorably toward a resolution that, one way or another, more tragically or less, can only be schmaltzy. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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