Slumdog Millionaire

New York Post Lou Lumenick

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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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

USA Today Claudia Puig

Director Danny Boyle's riveting and kaleidoscopic tale, based on Vikas Swarup's debut novel "Q and A," is exquisitely adapted to the screen by Simon Beaufoy.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

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

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The story may stretch credibility until it's ready to pop its seams, but Patel conveys the simple confidence of a prodigy who has learned everything important in life, except how to lie.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

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.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn't always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

A terrific yarn, one so engrossing and surprising that the nature of the story's structure -- each question Jamal gets asked on the show corresponds with a traumatic or momentous moment from his childhood -- never feels like a contrived framing device.

Empire Ian Nathan

Danny Boyle's finest since "Trainspotting." In fact, it's the best British/Indian gameshow-based romance of the millennium.

NPR Bob Mondello

Romantic, action-packed and always held together by an intriguing social conscience, Slumdog Millionaire is a rapturous crowd pleaser.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

Slumdog Millionaire features the simplest story Boyle has ever told, which may explain why its many pleasures are so pure.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

This is Boyle's fullest, most satisfying work and an audience-pleaser that deserves to be a big hit.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

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. No doubt Dickens himself would approve.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

The whole thing is irresistibly preposterous.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Boyle has been nothing if not bold with this film. He's dared to use so many venerable movie elements it's dizzying, dared us to say we won't be moved or involved, dared us to say we're too hip to fall for tricks that are older than we are.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, Slumdog Millionaire is a blast.

Village Voice Scott Foundas

An almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction--and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Like Mumbai, Slumdog pulses and throbs with raw, unadulterated life and the hope for a better Bombay, today. It's brilliant.

TV Guide Jason Buchanan

A great movie is something more than the sum total of all its parts, and here, the elements all come together to form a feature that speaks a universal form of optimism that isn't likely to get lost in translation, no matter where it screens, or who is watching.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Brimming with humor and heartbreak, Slumdog Millionaire meets at the border of art and commerce and lets one flow into the other as if that were the natural order of things.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The result is magical and life affirming, and will enrapture those who are not scared away by the mention of "subtitles."

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Boyle, one of the premier stylists in the world fills "Slumdog" with ebullient energy and ceaseless invention.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

It's a stunner.

Film Threat Scott Mendelson

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.

Time Richard Corliss

Despite its elements of brutality, this is a buoyant hymn to life, and a movie to celebrate.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

The real star of the film is not a person but a city, the vertiginous, exciting, massively overcrowded "maximum city" of Mumbai. On one hand, this environment of Dickensian, almost hallucinatory contrasts between rich and poor, good and evil feels perfect for Danny Boyle.

Slate Dana Stevens

A stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

After last year's black-hearted "No Country for Old Men," the Oscars may well be in the mood to embrace a fairy tale sampling every imaginable genre, with a note of triumph accompanying even the worst suffering, capped by the snazziest ending money can buy.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish fulfillment.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker's calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale).

The Hollywood Reporter Peter Brunette

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.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

What IS surprising is the unembarrassed energy that Boyle devotes to his pursuit of the obvious; there’s nothing wrong with the formulaic, it would appear, so long as you bring the formula to the boil.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

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

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The entire film has the glibness of a music video. Boyle has managed to make dire poverty seem glossy.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Doesn't hit its stride until the last 30 minutes, and by then, it's just a little too late.