Slumdog Millionaire: Critic Reviews

Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish fulfillment. It's like the Bollywood version of a Capra fable sprayed with colorful drops of dark-side-of-the-Third-World squalor.

A gaudy, gorgeous rush of color, sound and motion, Slumdog Millionaire doesn't travel through the lower depths, it giddily bounces from one horror to the next.

Despite being overpraised - it arrives garlanded with the kind of reviews that must have come out after the opening night of King Lear - this is still very effective entertainment.

The beautifully rendered and energetic tale celebrates resilience, the power of knowledge and the vitality of the human experience. Horrifying, humorous and life-affirming, it is, above all, unforgettable.

Like all good fairy tales, this outsize celebration of perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea -- in this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what's worth knowing at all.

I'll keep this simple: Cancel whatever you're doing tonight and go see Slumdog Millionaire instead.

When Boyle pulls back to show us his grand vision, it's a stunner. And everything suddenly falls into place, as if this uncommonly daring film was fated to work from the very start.

Slumdog Millionaire is the film world's first globalized masterpiece.

Slumdog Millionaire is not the cure for all the world's ills, but it comes close. It solves, for instance, such endemic global problems as: a) sadness, b) lovelessness, c) cynicism, and d) the waning cultural relevance of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Watching Slumdog Millionaire, it's easy to believe director Danny Boyle has been working toward this brilliantly woven masterwork with each entertaining and diverse tale he's delivered.

Slumdog Millionaire is [Boyle's] liveliest fusion of style and content since Trainspotting.

There are no surprises in this movie, and most people will be able to predict, within the first ten minutes, roughly how the last ten will pan out.

This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time.

Slumdog Millionaire is a ruthlessly effective paean to destiny, leaving nothing to chance. It also has a good shot at winning this year's Academy Award for best picture, if the pundits, Allah, Shiva and Fox Searchlight Pictures have anything to say

The movie brushes against some of India's worst social ills, but it's essentially a fairy tale.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does, look out: a movie that rocks and rolls, that transports, startles, delights, shocks, seduces. A movie that is, quite simply, great.

Don't let the exotic setting put you off; this is a massively cool cross-cultural crowd-pleaser.

The film is a delight.

Much of the film is so overwhelming as sheer mass spectacle that it serves as a sobering view of an overpopulated part of the world that defies any judgmental analysis.

Boyle and Beaufoy, working from a novel by Vikas Swarup, uninsistently make the case that the most useful intelligence, in all its forms, comes from life experience.

Four stars simply aren't enough for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which just may be the most entertaining movie I've ever labeled a masterpiece in these pages.

[A] taut, tense and witty tale of human tragedy and triumphant humanity set against the sweep of modern India.

Not that the movie from director Danny Boyle isn't satisfying, isn't more than worth seeing. But I had been expecting cinematic fireworks to justify the claim that it's the best movie of the new millennium.

Slumdog Millionaire is skillful entertainment, with the simple message that the most intense life experiences yield the greatest education.

The real star of the film is not a person but a city, the vertiginous, exciting, massively overcrowded 'maximum city' of Mumbai.