Powerful crime drama does more than just expose the criminal underbelly of South African township life.

What a simple and yet profound story this is.

This powerful South African drama turns on the debut performance of young Presley Chweneyagae as the hood, and it's magnificent: a stone-faced killer in the opening scenes, he becomes an open book as the story progresses, as frightened, confused, and needy as the baby he drags around town in a shopping bag.

It grabs you from a symbolic opening scene of gang members rolling the dice -- the odds, it soon becomes clear, are stacked against them getting lucky -- and never lets go.

As Tsotsi, Chweneyagae turns his face into a living battle mask -- curved, molded and sandpapered into smooth ruthlessness. But as the story unfolds, Tsotsi's mask begins to crack, and his humanity begins to flow through.

Hood handles his material so deftly that a conclusion which could have been mawkish and sentimental is instead bittersweet, both painful and quietly affirming.

Packs an unexpected emotional wallop. Gavin Hood's film tells a story of violence and redemption that's even more remarkable when you consider that neither of the lead performers had ever acted in a movie previously.

An explosive wide-screen vision of the street life of Soweto, bursting with music, danger and vitality, and the extraordinary story of a ruthless young criminal known only as Tsotsi.

Made with local talent by a South African director, Tsotsi is lifted above the current slew of movies portraying Africa as a helpless victim of its many problems, redeemable only by sympathetic white Westerners (as in John Boorman's sermonizing 2004 drama "In My Country," and to a lesser degree "The Constant Gardener"), by its vigorously transcendent spirit of self-help.

Tsotsi emerges as being among the finest films ever to come out of Africa. It is a brilliant, jolting and altogether powerful blast of energy and emotion.

Brutal but believable, the film in some ways harks back to early Hollywood, when Jimmy Cagney or Richard Widmark played callow villains out of their depth in everyday life.

Based on a play by Athol Fugard, Tsotsi is South Africa's entry in this year's Oscar race for Best Foreign-Language Film. This remarkable movie means to shake you, and boy does it ever.

When a director can take a reprehensible monster and, over the course of a scant 90 minutes, turn audience reaction from distaste to sympathy, that's the mark of an adept filmmaker. This occurs in Tsotsi.

Hood's film, with its bold, beautiful cinematography and hard-thumping kwaito music, brings us into a different world, and then helps us to understand it.