Favela Rising (premieres Thu., May 27, 7 p.m., Cinemax) Set in what one inhabitant calls "the Brazilian Bosnia," Matt Mochary and Jeff Zimbalist's documentary profiles the members of AfroReggae, whose musical uplift and community activism has reputedly kept hundreds off the streets of Rio de Janeiro's notorious favelas. Anderson Sa, whose rhymes are equal parts nonviolent exhortation and from-the-'hood testimony, hails from Vigário Geral, which he calls the worst of Rio's slums, not least for a 1993 incident in which police avenged the death of four officers by executing 21 randomly chosen innocents, including a family of eight and Sa's brother. (As anyone who saw Bus 174 already knows, Rio's police are underpaid and untrained; a journalist here identifies corrupt cops as the chief supplier of weapons to the favelas' drug armies.) Sa, who tears up when recalling the massacre, doesn't discuss his brother's death directly, but it's clear the tragedy was pivotal; Sa stopped dealing drugs and started a homemade magazine that became the impetus for AfroReggae.

Although Favela Rising's sensationalist graphics and ominous synth-rattles position the movie for outsiders, Mochary and Zimbalist don't show AfroReggae's influence in the community so much as they prompt Sa and his colleagues to assess it. Sped-up, jaggedly edited concert footage conveys the music's energy at the expense of providing a real-time sense of the band's connection with an audience. Indeed, for all the movie's gimmicks (including a hypersaturated look imported wholesale from City of God), very little actually happens on screen; the filmmakers constantly seem to be trying to make up on the Avid what they missed in the shooting. The movie's overwrought opening paints Vigário Geral as hell on earth, but gives no sense of the communal roots that AfroReggae would soon tap into. The movie tells us a lot about how people die in the favelas, but too little about how they live.

Battle in Heaven ($24.99 DVD) Cannes wouldn't be Cannes without manufactured scandal, so every year, the festival's programmers make sure to program at least one movie with explicit sexual content, and every year, the press predictably pounces. This year, the lucky winner is John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus; last year's was Carlos Reygadas' second feature, Battle in Heaven. That such films are invariably condemned as pretentious or unerotic seems like a smokescreen for a much more predictable prudishness; no one wants to be so square as to attack a movie for being smutty, but calling the director pompous or humorless is fair game.

Reygadas, to be sure, seems to suffer no sense of self-doubt. Even more than his first film, Japn, Battle in Heaven deliberately taxes its audience with distended, self-aware landscape shots that beg comparison to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (an invitation Reygadas' champions have been happy to accept). But as tiresome as Tarkovsky's movies can sometimes be, you never get the sense that he's merely messing with you, as you do in the mock-virtuosic moment in Battle in Heaven when the camera pans away from a copulating couple to slowly, slowly scan the rooftops outside their window.

Of course, if you like being toyed with, there's nothing to worry about. Reygadas is a master mind-fucker, in subtle as well as blatant ways. The latter have dominated most everything written about Battle in Heaven—not surprising considering that the movie opens with a slow pan down the torso of an impassive fat man to find a young, dreadlocked woman sucking his condom-sheathed cock. (Even better, the camera somehow pans between her face and his body to capture a mascara-stained tear escaping from her eye.) But Reygadas is just as effective scoring a conversation between the fat man, who turns out to be a Mexican politician's driver, and his equally corpulent wife, with the incessant high-pitched bleep of a cheap alarm clock. The movie's Mexico City is at once mundane and unearthly, composed of quotidian details and vast, open, overlit spaces harking back to the movie's title.

It would be unfair to reveal too much of the movie's plot, but it centers around the relationship between a Mexican politician's driver (the fat dude) and his impetuous club-kid daughter, an edgy, uneasy bond too informed by mismatched power dynamics to qualify as a friendship. Suffice it to say that the movie is about guilt, both individual and historical, and the awful things people will do to avoid facing it. Reygadas has an uncanny knack for fusing the sacred and the mundane; his Mexico City is at once grittily realistic and subtly unearthly—and that goes for the sex scenes, too.