A stunning piece of work that should be essential viewing for anyone who calls themselves a cinephile and are willing to embark on gut-wrenching experiences, Pixote is a criminally under-seen masterpiece.

Hector Babenco turns in one of the more courageous filmmaking efforts I've ever had the chance to witness on screen, depicting the gritty and heartless Brazilian streets of Sao Paulo, where there is no mercy or forgiveness for the orphaned minors who inhabit it. I never felt like I was watching anything false or dramatized during my time with this film, only real life. It helps that Babenco gathered his youngsters from the same areas that the film is depicting, none of them ever acting before or after this.…

"Pixote" é uma obra-prima enquanto seus personagens estão no cárcere. Hector Babenco revisita o neorrealismo num conto humanista, mas primal, virulento e violento. Não há muitos pudores, quase nenhum, nem com a nudez dos atores, muitos menores de idade. Esse excesso de liberdade ajuda a tornar seus personagens extremamente envolventes, mesmo que seus intérpretes tenham pouca ou nenhuma experiência. Enquanto os meninos estão presos, "mortos para o mundo", o filme é vivo e pulsante. Quando eles saem, o filme cai abruptamente porque depende muito de uma qualidade de atuação que os protagonistas ainda precisavam desenvolver e a história em si talvez se volte demais para prospeções, enquanto na primeira parte o que interessava era menos a história e mais o…

Devastatingly bleak.

From the opening scenes, it's clear there is a deep rooted undercurrent to the film. A film that is genuinely harrowing as it is such a realistic portrayal of events that take place in the darkest corners of the our world every day.

Corruption, lies and violence are used as tools to repress a part of society that simply cannot defend itself. Politicians and their hired stooges do the bare minimum to keep the problems of this 'scourge of society' away from the voting public, but never really commit to addressing the problem. Decades go by, yet nothing really changes.

Pixote is a horrendously raw representation of the thousands of Brazilian street kids who exist in a lonely…

Quick shout-out to Austin Lord 69. He knows why 😏

I completely forgot about the existence of 1981's Pixote before rediscovering it a short while back. Having been compared to the higher rated and more popular 2002's City of God, Pixote almost certainly inspired the aforementioned film. Both are Brazilian films dealing with the community of poverty-ridden adolescents within the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Lost amongst a constantly-evolving world, they suffer injustices that are unspeakable and difficult to even imagine. With Pixote, we were shown how the system mistreated the children in their hands. It's an engrossing and horrifying portrait of life in Brazil for the "unlucky" ones and it's depressing to know that many of these events have actually…

Possibly the bleakest thing I've watched in a week where I also saw a documentary about terminal cancer patients on the Isle of Wight, Hector Babenco's international breakthrough is also a gripping film that drips with purpose from its introduction onwards. That intro - where the director stands in a favela describing the inequality that spurred him on to make the film, and explaining how he chose his non-professional cast - might be seen as patronising by some, but for me it aligns it with a more radical, Brechtian kind of social realism that I find more rewarding than the Victorian literary naturalism the term normally denotes. If you're angry about something, it is better to agitate, provoke, shock and…

Pixote first came to my attention when, earlier this year, Harmony Korine named it as his "favorite film of all time". After I finally got my hands on a copy and watched it, I could certainly see how it could be. It paints a disturbingly vivid portrait of the devastating amount of corruption going on in Brazil at the time, much of which reverberates to the present day. It follows a group of young boys and a trans-girl during their stay in an oppressive, dangerous juvenile reformatory. Yet even after their escape around the middle of the film, the outside world gives them little option to better their lives. They are doomed to a world of corruption and depravity due…

"Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco", dirigido pelo saudoso e talentoso Héctor Babenco, é mais um clássico absoluto do nosso cinema brasileiro, é uma obra que carrega toda uma fragilidade assustadora, e faz um retrato cruel em plena ditadura militar, sobre a falta de políticas públicas voltadas para crianças e adolescentes em situação de vulnerabilidade social, tudo é monstrado em tela, em sua forma mais explícita, desigual, suja e desumana possível, a violência aqui não é acobertada, ela é a ponte que liga tudo, o trabalho do elenco é primoroso a entrega dos atores é palpável chega em um nível de realidade impressionante, todos merecem ressalvas pelo desempenho memorável dos personagens. Pixote é uma obra-prima arrebatadora, seja pela sua vulnerabilidade…