MOVIE REVIEW
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Slumdog Millionaire Has Winning Pedigree
Critics can't resist the brutal, yet 'upbeat,' slice of Mumbai life
By Matt Cantor
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Posted Nov 14, 08 2:27 PM CST
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(Newser)
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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.”