Maybe the rawest film on this top ten list, "City Of God" is a sprawling epic that takes the viewer inside a world that few of us will ever experience, the favelas of Rio.  Comparisons have been made between this film and "GoodFellas," and that's fair.  Both tell the stories of a community united by crime, both are narrated by the main character as he moves from childhood to adulthood in this world, but the difference is fundamental:  Henry Hill wanted in, while Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) would do anything to get out. The way Fernando Meirelles and his co-director Katia Lund bring the energy and the passion and the excitement and the danger of this world to life, and the way they give the entire film this jangling, thumping pulse all its own... that's what grabbed me by the throat when I first saw this film, and even though I saw it in January of the year it came out, there was never a moment during the next twelve months that anything else even remotely threatened to knock it off that top spot.  Harrowing but oddly uplifting, "City Of God" is a place worth revisiting, over and over and over.