Tropa de Elite is the most talked about Brazilian film since Fernando Meirelles' Oscar-nominated masterpiece City of God. Director Jose Padilha has already scooped the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with this extremely violent and moving work based on fictionalised accounts of the activities of Rio de Janeiro's strategic paramilitary police force just before the Pope's visit to Brazil in 1997. The film is an in depth exploration of want it takes to become a member of BOPE, or Rio's Special Police Operation Battalion. It is also an exposé of systemic corruption within Rio's police forces.

Few people will remember the Brazilian police authorities flying to Britain in 2005 to humiliate the Metropolitan Police about the folly of "shoot to kill" policies following the tragic accidental shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Even then I thought, "Hello, who are the Brazilian Police to lecture the Met about the fallacy of shooting first and asking questions later?" If anything, Tropa de Elite is cinematic proof that the police forces in Rio are real experts in lethal violence and arbitrary torture.

Tropa de Elite graphically depicts what many of us in the West had already suspected about the Brazilian authorities attitude towards policing in the slums of Rio – they train, arm themselves to the teeth, and unleash death squads in Rio's poor and lawless favelas. The central character, Capitan Nascimento (Wagner Moura), coldly explains how BOPE "enter the favela to kill – never to die." Capitan Nascimento is Rio's Beowulf, a good-looking archetypal heroic militarist who is also a hideous monster, and he knows it – that is one reason why he must leave this elite police squad. Moura delivers an impressive performance as the tough but flawed Capitan. Tropa de Elite is no ordinary cops and robbers film - it is to all intents and purposes a civil war film.