Slumdog Millionaire

It's not about poverty pornography. It's not about a White guy showing us touchy Brown-skins squatting by the rail-tracks. In the end, it's just about a film, which sweeps you up and takes you for an exhilarating ride on the wild side.

Slumdog Millionaire is an exhilarating ride -- a feel-good yarn about a Mumbai street kid directed by Danny Boyle with a wild energy that makes even Trainspotting (Boyle's calling card) look leaden-footed.

There are so many frantic pursuits through heaving streets that it is easy to lose track of who is chasing whom, or why. Energy and urgency are substituted for realism.

Slumdog is a good film and an appealing film with some lovely performances but it's not a great film: it's too sentimental and predictable for that.

Boyle set out to make this particular film rather than a gritty social panorama along the lines of Brazilian favela drama City of God. But keeping us cheerful takes the edge off the tougher insights into India.

Boyle takes his wildly high-energy visual aesthetic and applies it to a story that, at its core, is rather sweet and traditionally crowdpleasing.

Danny Boyle has mastered the modern fairy tale. Eliminating fantasy from the equation and finding magic in the everyday, he’s grounded the dreamy storybook experience with realistic settings and circumstances that don’t diminish the fateful exhilaration

Danny Boyle’s underdog movie about a slum kid in India who defies all odds and follows his heart into the final rounds of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” was the most unabashedly, tragically, rapturously romantic film of 2008.

Admittedly, the narrative can be unapologetically sentimental, but Boyle and his team execute it with such finesse that it becomes impossible not to embrace this tender film.

Even with its minor faults, the movie is, on the whole, an astoundingly uplifting, monumentally feel-good picture.