Director Sérgio Machado, who worked as an assistant to Central Station's Walter Salles, lingers sensually over every wrong move his attractive tragic trio make.

Alice Braga owns this film.

Whatever its pretensions of social relevance, Sérgio Machado's Lower City is essentially an exploitation movie, and not a half-bad one at that.

The impressive first feature by Sergio Machado, a one-time assistant to Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries"), is a trip through a grungy world of crime, sex and cockfights.

Three potent performances readily compensate for the familiar plot.

Despite the lurid content, this is a beautifully made film that reaches for moral seriousness and resists facile judgments.

Though the storyline is dirt simple and not particularly meaningful or involving, the action in this character-driven film is scintillatingly sexy.

In the end, Lower City is never quite as energetic as it wants to be, touched by the strange, milky lethargy that steeps every waterfront film.

The themes are all familiar and the plot unfolds slowly and in predictable ways, but there's plenty of heat generated by the three leads.

Lower City is sexy, but in a nice, dirty way. Everyone in it is deliciously low and sleazy, and so underdressed in the blazing heat that they are just dying to strip.

Even though Lower City ultimately leads nowhere (the movie doesn't end so much as simply stop), you won't mind having taken the trip.

From its actual and figurative scenes of cockfighting to its copious use of throbbing Brazilian music, there's little here that rises above the level of formula. But director Machado displays a sure touch in his ability to convey the sultry atmosphere of his exotic setting, and he has elicited admirably naturalistic performances from his highly attractive, youthful performers.

Everyone involved in the film seems better than the material.

In trying for realism, Machado only achieves dramatic inertness.