Slumdog Millionaire
(2008)The big winner at the 2009 Academy Awards (eight Oscars in total, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay) is Danny Boyle's (Trainspotting, Sunshine) Slumdog Millionaire.... More
Jamal Malik (Patel), born into dire poverty, is an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai. The nation is watching as Jamal climbs that little ladder of cash on India's 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' And climb he does, eventually one question away from winning the jackpot: 20 million rupees. But then the show breaks for the night, and police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street kid know so much?
The police spend the night probing Jamal's past, recounting his life in the slums where he and his brother grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika (Pinto), the girl he loved and lost.Hide
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Winner of 8 Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay - Academy Awards 2009. Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay - BAFTA Awards 2009. Best Film (Drama), Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score - Golden Globes 2009. Audience Award winner at Toronto Film Festival 2008.
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Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Saurabh Shukla, Rajendranath Zutshi, Freida Pinto, Irfan Khan
Written by Simon Beaufoy (based on the novel by Vikas Swarup)
On Demand, DVD & Blu-Ray
Available from 3 providers
Flicks Review
BY Andrew Hedley Flicks Writer
Within moments of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire beginning, we find ourselves racing through the crowded slums of Mumbai, bombarded with colour and sound, grabbing our armrests as this cinematic super-pill hits our bloodstream. Rarely has a film felt so alive. Boyle intersperses the pulsating energy with flickery slo-mo, hits it with a blistering M.I.A. soundtrack, and even gives the subtitles a personality.... More
Kind of frustrating, then, that the second half turns into a rather conventional, predictable and plodding love story - one where the characters say “I’m in love” a lot but you never actually believe it. This very contemporary (and perhaps culturally significant) merging of British independence with Bollywood melodrama works best during the flashback scenes to the characters’ childhoods. The cheeky little street urchins are far more interesting than their teenage incarnations. Dev Patel (from TV’s Skins), as the older Jamal, seems a bit too earnest and subdued considering his character's tumultuous upbringing.
But yes, I got swept up at the end. As will everyone. There’s no denying the solid crowd pleaser structure behind this. And good on director Danny Boyle for varying his style once again. By filming 75% of the movie on small digital cameras, some of them prototypes, and taking a skeleton crew deep into the slums, he’s created a vibrant, pungent, scrappy little underdog tale.Hide
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Slumdog Millionaire
BY adamatdramatrain superstar
O.M.G. I am so thankful I don't live their life which if course is real!!! What a movie. Thank you to all who made this movie. I wish I had a magic wand to pass over that terrible terrible evil place where people are commodities like fish in a market. It was a brilliant movie with a great hollywood story drenched with real life.
Showing 5 of 26 reviews. See all reviews
The Press Reviews
94%
of critics recommend.
Rotten Tomatoes Score. More reviews on Rotten Tomatoes
When I saw "Slumdog Millionaire" at Toronto, I was witnessing a phenomenon: dramatic proof that a movie is about how it tells itself. I walked out of the theater and flatly predicted it would win the Audience Award. Seven days later, it did. And that it could land a best picture Oscar nomination. We will see. It is one of those miraculous entertainments that achieves its immediate goals and keeps climbing toward a higher summit. Full Review
Danny Boyle's finest since "Trainspotting." In fact, it's the best British/Indian gameshow-based romance of the millennium. Full Review
Absolutely perfect family entertainment for anyone over the age of ten. It is a celebration of not just the usual triumph of the human spirit, but a celebration of the human experience. Full Review
What's perhaps most fascinating about the film is Boyle's relentless focus on the realities of present-day India as a vehicle for his spectacle and laughs. Full Review
A Hollywood-style romantic melodrama that delivers major studio satisfactions in an ultra-modern way, was made on the streets of India with largely unknown stars by a British director who never makes the same movie twice? Go figure. Full Review
A gaudy, gorgeous rush of color, sound and motion, “Slumdog Millionaire,” the latest from the British shape-shifter Danny Boyle, doesn’t travel through the lower depths, it giddily bounces from one horror to the next. A modern fairy tale about a pauper angling to become a prince... Full Review
The movie takes audiences to the poorest sections of India and shows a level of poverty and human misery that's almost beyond our imagining - and yet so pervasive that people seem to take it in stride, as an unalterable fact. The movie provides an indelible education into how other people live, and that's a noble function. We get the range of modern Indian life, from the technological sophistication of its television stations to the primitive shacks in which people live in crushing proximity to one another. The film is so vivid that you can almost smell it, and there are images that will linger with viewers for a long time. Full Review
Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, Slumdog Millionaire is a blast. Full Review
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