Slumdog Millionaire Has Winning Pedigree

Slumdog Millionaire's feel-good story is tough to resist, critics say. The hard-knock life of a boy who goes from the streets of Mumbai to game-show fantasyland is “one of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Still, “its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart,” she notes.

Kenneth Turan, in the Los Angeles Times, has fewer qualms, calling Danny Boyle’s latest the “best old-fashioned audience picture of the year,” and “a Hollywood-style romantic melodrama that delivers major studio satisfactions in an ultra-modern way.” And Roger Ebert is charmed: the “breathless, exciting story,” he writes in the Chicago Sun-Times, “will present the real India to millions of moviegoers for the first time.” (More film stories.)