Director: Danny Boyle, 15, 120min

Stars: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor

On general release

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BACKGROUND

• A journey from the gutters to the stars

• Boyle explains why Mumbai is a key location

• Urban fairytale wins film awards

• Slumdog Millionaire may become film winner

• The Big Film: Slumdog Millionaire

BACKGROUND

• Slumdog Millionaire: the Indian press reaction

• Fours stars for Slumdog Millionaire

• Slumdog Millionaire - the Sunday Times review

• Slumdog Millionaire

• Slumdog success silences national row

Boyle's latest film captures the contradictions of India - the exuberant pleasures and the polluting ugliness - as effectively as any film I can think of since Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding. In fact, the story of Jamal Malik, an orphan from the Mumbai slums who gets to compete and triumph on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? could serve as a metaphor for India's evolution from third world country to international powerhouse. It is part optimistic, romantic fairytale, and part nightmare of corruption, cruelty and cynical exploitation.

Boyle is growing increasingly confident telling stories from outside the British Isles. His smartest creative decision is the one that elevates Slumdog to among his very best pictures - the choice of the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. Mantle's handheld, instinctive, quasi-documentary approach shaped several of the Dogme films, and it also gave Boyle's 28 Days Later its ferocious urgency. Always supremely confident capturing movement, with Slumdog Millionaire Mantle finds himself saturated with colour. Out of India's searing saffron yellows, sizzling scarlets and azure blues, Mantle crafts a constantly shifting living mural.

Jamal is played by three actors, but it is Patel, playing him as an adult, who anchors the film. The structure, which cuts between the electrifying thrill of the television show, a brutal police interrogation by officers who suspect him of cheating and flashbacks to Jamal's early life, creates a swell of joyous momentum. It's impossible not to get carried along by Jamal's journey, particularly when it becomes clear that it was never the money that motivated him to enter Millionaire, but a fatalistic belief that it was his last chance to connect with his childhood sweetheart, Latika (the luminous Pinto).

The soundtrack choices are rather obvious at times - the lyrics of M.I.A.'s Paper Planes fit a little too neatly with the action on screen. But the feel-good fantasy element of this romance between two orphans from the slums is irresistible.

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