The verdict: Easily the best gangster flick since "Goodfellas."

By BOB LONGINO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The opening salvo in the remarkable "City of God" is a single, tingling scrape of a butcher knife across a sharpening stone.

The barely perceptible image and its audible, lightning-bolt scratch last but a microsecond before the screen goes dark. Then it blazingly pulsates again. And again.

This lacerating fanfare begins a vibrant and bloody Brazilian gangster film, a fast-paced, thoroughly involving and artistically astute movie detailing the violent youth-gang drug culture in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Before its last, frenetic gunbattle in the streets, there's no doubt audiences have been treated to the best gangster flick since "Goodfellas" and, easily, one of the best movies of the current Oscar season.

Few films, least of all those propelled by mass-market Hollywood, display the confidence and inventive know-how of director Fernando Meirelles' "City of God." It's the "Gangs of New York" that Martin Scorsese tried to make. Filmed with dazzling cinematic verve and a neorealistic eye, it's full of sadistic young drug lords, crooked cops, headline-loving, gun-toting gangsters and curvy, ambitious molls. Based on Paulo Lins' 700-page book of individual stories of fictionalized and real-life gangland figures living and dying in the slums outside Rio, "City of God" follows the intertwined lives of dozens of these memorable characters from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Their names pop off the screen. There's Knockout Ned, Li'l Zé and Goose; Shaggy, Steak & Fries and Melonhead.

The kid connecting all the tales is Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), a wannabe photographer who serves as the movie's narrator and nearly lone moral presence.

Meirelles' mean streets are the dusty, dirt-poor housing projects of Rio's favelas, slums ripe with drug dealing and gang warfare and populated with young adults, teens and pint-size youth. In "City of God," even the 6-year-olds likely are packing heat.

Every aspect of Meirelles' film is finely tuned. With the help of co-director Kátia Lund, Meirelles gathered roughly 200 real-life youths, workshopping them for nearly four months to develop their characters and performances. Many created their own dialogue. The result is akin to a Mike Leigh film — a mesmeric production as richly detailed as Leigh's "Topsy-Turvy," as unsettling and pulse-pounding as his "Naked."

The constant feeling of "City of God" is raw and kinetic, jazzed by a frequently moving camera and Meirelles' acute sense of storytelling. He's interested both in his characters and the place they inhabit. In one prescient scene, Meirelles' camera rests inside an apartment and, through time-lapse photography, watches it transform from simple home to dilapidated drug-kingpin headquarters.

Often, that camera takes on a life of its own, closely trailing a runaway chicken or freeze-framing on a particular character as Rocket relates a story. It's as visually intriguing as "Run Lola Run." Interestingly, Miramax held up releasing "City of God" in New York and Los Angeles until this month, making it ineligible this year for most Academy Award categories. But it will compete for a best foreign film Oscar nomination. And it has a good shot at winning, since the two most celebrated foreign films of 2002 are not in the running. Spain opted against submitting Pedro Almodóvar's "Talk to Her," and Mexico nixed "Y Tu Mamá También" as its entry.

While it's been a giant in its native Brazil, "City of God" isn't the kind of movie that can heat up U.S. box offices. Too many moviegoers here shun subtitled movies.

That's a shame. They'll miss out on a film as invigorating and stimulating as "The Hours," as provocative and multilayered as "Adaptation," as stampeding and involving as "Bowling for Columbine."

Honestly, "City of God" is like the movies Scorsese used to make. It holds much of the best of "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver," "Goodfellas" and "Raging Bull" — all rolled into one cinematic explosion. Simply put, it cuts like a butcher knife — the sharpest one.