A sweet, interesting mix of gritty, hand-held street style film-making, with a much more Hollywood story - a melodrama about girl singing group trying to make it, and get out of the ghettoUltimately a little thin on the character and emotional level for me, although I'll take it over a Hollywood bio-pic any day. But cliché's are cliché's, even if they're handled with more energy and panache than usual. You can see a lot of twists and conflicts coming a mile off.Also, some of the acting is pretty stiff – it feels like weak improvisation. Per several articles on the film, the women were picked for singing ability (which is very high, great voices!) first, and acting second. Most of the songs are terrific, a few are a little lame. Bottom line, if you're interested in the subject, it's worth seeing.

I was extremely surprised by this movie. The story seemed so real, the talent very well picked, true locations, the situations, everything in this movie is perfect without any exaggeration as many Brazilian movies are such as City of God or Quixote. This movie deserves much more than a 6.6, in my opinion is a 9. It's believable, I am sure it's base in somebody's true life story. Great movie. Must see! If you are looking for great singers, there four amazing singers in this movie. These are real talented singers; girls that should be professionals unlike so many professionals here in the US who cannot actually sing, they make it because of how they are marketed, not because they can sing. In any case, here in the US a movie is considered good based on how much money the movie made, it is not based on how good the movie is; also when you have Stars in a bad movie, still makes money, because the viewers have no clue. It's all about money, nothing else.

Wow, is this movie bad. First of all, the plot: there is none. The band goes from four girls to one as a series of script contrivances -- the two involving street violence being especially poorly presented -- combine to make them the single unluckiest backup girl group in Brazilian history. The script is just very immature: each character has exactly one emotion, or one character trait, or one purpose to serve in the story. You know exactly what's going to happen, and even if you didn't you simply wouldn't care. The lead has a nice screen presence and all the girls can sing beautifully, but "Antonia" will be remembered, at least by this viewer, only for a set of English subtitles so consistently awful I was sure they had to be intended as a parody. We're talking "Kung Fu" dubbing here...

I have just seen this movie at the Toronto International Film Festival. What a beauty! Everything works in this Brazilian movie. Script, Direction, Cinematography, Acting, the incredible score, just to name a few. The lives of the young women in the outskirts of São Paulo are depicted with captivating and breathtaking images along with outstanding performances. This is the kind of movie you leave the theatre with a sense of how powerful film-making can be. I went to see this movie without any knowledge of what the plot was going to be. From the very first frame I was brought into the lives of the main characters and couldn't let them go even after the credits had stopped rolling. Tata Amaral has certainly placed herself on the A-list of Brazilian movie makers.