The most exciting film of the year is City of God, by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. The movie is so fast-paced, so complicated yet seamless, so intricately shot, that it’s hard to get it out of your mind hours or days later. It tells the violent story of slum life in Rio, and most of the actors were found on the streets by Meirelles and trained in a series of acting workshops. The Washington Post gets the movie right: “It’s a trip to hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be.”
Author: Peter Maass
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
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