Let's see "Michael" break his way out of this prison.

Disappointing is an understatement.

"Carindiru is slim pickings compared to HBO's prison drama Oz." - Ed Gonzalez

Picked this up randomly when it came straight-to-dvd in the video store I used to work in, probably needs a rewatch (gonna watch some of Babenco's other stuff first, though) but I remember thinking it was only okay.

I feel like this would be super lame if I were brazilian.

Extraordinary. Carandiru humanizes the convicts, these excluded treaties as animals for the society. Undoubtedly, controversial.

good but it's not as good as "city of god"

Life inside a South American prison. Yucky, yet still romanticized in some ways. Still an entertaining movie

Looks really gritty and it's quite engaging. Unfortunately, the character motivations aren't very well developed. The conditions in the prison don't seem that bad at all, really. They can have off-site meals with family, have a visitors day where they can have conjugal visits inside of their own cells, and have football matches for fun. When I read the description, I expected shit to straight up suck in that prison, so I don't really understand why the action progressed the way it did.

If you liked City of God, this is like more of the same. This movie shows the inside view of a prison in Sao Paulo, pains vivid portraits of the inmates in there, with stories of how they got there, their daily desperations, their humanity in the face of such inhumanity. The prison riot seemed cathartic after looking at these people's experiences, this movie puts a human side to these outcasts of society.