Watch Pixote For Free

You won't be disappointed!

Touches You

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

A deeply disturbing and heartbreaking neo-realist film, about an abandoned, unwanted 10 year old living first in a reformatory, and then on Brazil's mean streets. The performances Babenco gets from his non-professional cast are amazing, especially his tiny young lead. The film almost totally avoids the twin traps of false sentimentality (although it's got plenty of emotion), or needless flashiness. It occasionally feels aimless, but somehow, in the end, it always adds up. Probably the weakest, most problematic moment is the opening, where the 'director' (Babenco, or an actor?) tells us that these actors are real people, gives us some facts and figures about them, and tells that their lives are much like those shown in the film. It then took me the next few minutes to forget about that, and get involved with the characters, and not get all caught up in pondering the artistic complexities of 'real people' playing a dramatic variation on their lives. The film doesn't need that kind of blunt framing device.So perhaps I don't consider this terrific, important film a 'perfect' masterpiece as so many do - but I deeply admire it and respect it, would encourage everyone to see it (though you doubtless find the experience upsetting) and look forward to seeing it a third time. You will never be able to look at a poor kid on the street quite the same way again.

Pixote is directed with barely a shred of sentimentality. And yet I more than imagine Hector Babenco owes some of his film-making chops with this film to Vittorio De Sica's neo-realist style, in particular Shoeshine (that film, as with Pixote, takes place mostly inside a children's prison). And yet while I might still prefer De Sica's film if it came down to deciding between the two it's so close because it is, no pun intended, like choosing between two children. They're both marvelous works of raw drama, and with Pixote Babenco has an extra edge and harrowing quality to deal with in that this isn't filmed in conditions brought on after a world war. This is how it was in Brazil- one would see it with slightly more flair and awe in City of God, perhaps in some of the same locations- and these children were on the streets before and after the film was made. Some aren't alive some 20+ years later, for all anyone knows.The "star", pre-teen street kid Fernando Ramos da Silva, plays the title character, a youth without a father or really any family who will look out for him, and placed among dozens of other street kids and delinquents in a reformatory for boys. The conditions couldn't be much worse, and are made even more unbearable as two children are killed one after the other by some cause of the guard duty. There's a riot, and an escape, and halfway through the film we find Pixote with a few other youths, including Lilica a practical transvestite not even 18, and they become pickpockets, drug dealers, whatever to get by. None of this, I should repeat, is shown with a kind of ham-fisted earnestness- certainly you would never in a million years see Ron Howard or Paul Haggis direct this kind of picture- and yet there's an emotional honesty to everything exactly because nothing is trivialized.Nearly every scene is significant to showing how fragile life is for Pixote, and how he could be killed or die some way at any turn, and so without even reaching puberty yet he has to be on the level of those around him who are a little older (though not by much at all) and become things that will haunt this person forever. Despite Babenco's usage of a tender and mournful musical score and one or two scenes with people crying a lot, nothing feels forced. As with De Sica, maybe more-so given the consistent conditions of San Paolo and Rio street kids, he's a natural director of children, and coax's out of Ramos da Silva and Jorge Julião and others some really fine work that provides just the right touches of "cinematic" drama (that is not so real that it becomes documentary, which isn't a bad thing per-say) and even subtlety in some scenes.Pixote may not be as well known as it's later 21st century Brazilian films that look back on the horrors of Rio, or even neo-realist films, but it should be. Anyone wanting to get a good, hard glimpse at what it was like should seek it out at a library or other and soak in what is the best foreign film of 1981.

Trust the excellent and accurate Junagadh75 review! This film is compelling and moving in that roughest, most brutally beautiful film-masterpiece "way". File under UNFORGETTABLE STRONG MEAT. Or FILMS THAT HOWL AT THE MOON. Pixote gets into your nervous system and elevates you despite the pain on the screen. Here's an unrelated list of films that did the same thing for me, i.e. "engaged, destroyed, transformed,inspired, resonated... this category transcends nerdy film top ten lists that seek film perfection. "A Woman Under the Influence" , "Wiseblood", "Wages of Fear" "Saint Jack" "Funny Bones" "Out of the Blue".

For me, this is another one of those films that I got to see off of the Los Angeles based "Z" Channel when it was in service. And it was another one of those movies that I saw when I was young...and learned that there was a world out there...one I did not want to accept.Moving to Los Angeles and getting to watch international cinema became quite the guilty pleasure hobby of mine and to date, no premiere channel programming has matched the "Z" Channel in its showing of international films. The three international films that stuck in my young head were "Spetters", "Beau Pere" and of course this one, "Pixote".This was the most shocking and saddest movie I ever witnessed in my life. This was also one of the first movies that made me understand that there IS a difference in cinema: to entertain, and to inform. Let me be honest..growing up in a small town on the east coast, I had no idea anything like this -- to this extent -- existed. All I knew from South America was brochures of fabulous Brazillian vacations and that Columbia had a lot of drug trafficking.Then comes a film like Pixote. Sad. Disturbing. Unflinching. Scary. You're watching: Children. Those that need shelter, love, understanding and all these get are a way to survive day after day through drugs, sex, robbing, stealing, sleeping on the streets and in sadistic group homes etc. Their survival is hard to watch with other street children, prostitutes, etc., and you begin to wonder HOW can things like this be allowed to happen in this world.Pixote is not a film for entertainment, it is a film of information. It shows shocking and disturbing images - but it shows life for these daily street children.