Quentin Tarantino’s career may have been on hold of late, but south of the border his influence seems to be flourishing. In 2001, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros made use of Pulp Fiction–esque skewed chronology, hip, lowlife heroes, kinetic camera work and editing, glib cynicism, and lurid violence in a redolently squalid Mexico City setting. He won critical praise and an Oscar nomination. Brazilian directors Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund do much the same in Cidade de Deus/City of God, locating its slick mayhem in the Rio de Janeiro housing project of the title during the ’60s through the ’80s and lowering the ages of its gun-toting gangbangers for added shock value (and, given that city’s reputation for juvenile crime, greater verisimilitude).

Based on the based-in-fact novel by Paulo Lins, Cidade de Deus opens to find its protagonist, Buscape (Alexandre Rodrigues), in a tense moment, caught in a standoff between the police and the heavily armed gang of Zé Pequeno (Leandro Firmino da Hora). The situation sends Buscape’s voiceover narrative off in seemingly random, anecdotal directions that are slyly structured to undermine the audience’s expectations and end up in a surprising but neatly conceived resolution. Among the stories he relates is that of Zé Pequeno himself, who starts his career as a bloodthirsty 11-year-old who looks like a demented Gary Coleman and who offs Buscape’s brother en route to becoming the crime lord of the neighborhood.

But Buscape, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio in the equally stylized and stereotypical Gangs of New York, is no warrior bent on payback. He gets his revenge by pursuing his dream to be a photographer, and in a way art finally does triumph. Not so for the film, however, where the horrific images of children shooting children don’t sit well with a tone of jaded irony, and the grinding nightmare of poverty and crime resists Cidade de Deus’s playful generic conventions. In Portuguese with English subtitles. (135 minutes)