Slumdog Millionaire.

"A gaudy, gorgeous rush of color, sound and motion, Slumdog Millionaire, the latest from the British shape-shifter Danny Boyle, doesn't travel through the lower depths, it giddily bounces from one horror to the next," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "A modern fairy tale about a pauper angling to become a prince, this sensory blowout largely takes place amid the squalor of Mumbai, India, where lost children and dogs sift through trash so fetid you swear you can smell the discarded mango as well as its peel, or could if the film weren't already hurtling through another picturesque gutter."

Writing in the Voice, Scott Foundas finds Slumdog to be "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.... Like so many of the Bollywood melodramas it stylistically apes, Boyle's film is unapologetically pop, even as Boyle himself seems to be at once inside and outside the idiom, embracing it while winking slyly at our collective need for escapist fantasy."

Updated through 11/17.

"The over-reliance on MIA nods to where Slumdog Millionaire is coming from," writes Eric Hynes for indieWIRE. Boyle "and British screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) approach their indigenous Indian locales and characters as though components of some pop diaspora, equating wild flower with root.... Like a deep-pocketed club owner or talent manager, Boyle sells Mumbai - or the hip Anglo vision of it - as the new hotness. And pace the title, he's slumming his way to millions."

"Slumdog Millionaire is fantasy yet its hyperactively effervescent (if still personal, intimate) portrait of both ingrained social barriers and altruism's ability to demolish them is genuine and sweet," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "And although these qualities occasionally falter during some overly broad comedic wrong notes, the film nonetheless possesses a gripping aesthetic and emotional dynamism that can only be expressed, finally, via prototypical Bollywood dance-choreography pageantry."

"Slumdog Millionaire is dazzling entertainment," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine. "If it's only that, and not quite up to the director's absolute best, it's because Jamal [Dev Patel] and Latika [Freida Pinto] have the simplistic relationship of a silent movie couple - sweet, earnest, torn apart by fate - and not the messy chemistry of true love."

"I suspect that Slumdog Millionaire will turn out to be one of Mr Boyle's most successful films precisely because the varied parts don't cohere as smoothly as they are supposed to in the ideal well-made film," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

For Alonso Duralde, writing at MSNBC, this is "a movie so compelling and, ultimately, upbeat, that it left me grinning wider than anything I've seen in ages."

Louis Peitzman gets a few words with Boyle for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Online viewing tip. David Poland talks with Boyle, Patel and Pinto.

Earlier: Reviews from Telluride and Toronto.

Updates: "Throughout his still-young film career, director Boyle has shown a knack for locating joy in the unlikeliest of subjects, whether heroin addiction (Trainspotting) or zombie epidemic (28 Days Later)," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "With Slumdog Millionaire, this gift blossoms fully, and the result is one of the very best films of the year."

"Boyle is a smashing director, and I mean that literally," blogs David Edelstein. "He smash-cuts from shot to shot, scene to scene, chase to chase.... But he's brilliant at what he does, at the kind of hyperkinetic, every-shot-a-grabber filmmaking that many attempt and few bring off. Even with the arty lighting and tricky focus and canted angles, the action is fluid, the momentum headlong. Slumdog Millionaire is his liveliest fusion of style and content since Trainspotting."

"True to its roots, Slumdog ends with a chastely rapturous kiss and an all-out dance number, composed by Bollywood deity AR Rahman," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "Despite its elements of brutality, this is a buoyant hymn to life, and a movie to celebrate."

Rachel Abramowitz talks with Beaufoy for the Los Angeles Times, where Kenneth Turan calls Slumdog "the best old-fashioned audience picture of the year."

New York's Logan Hill talks with Rahman about his score.

Online listening tip. Rob Davis talks with Boyle at Daily Plastic.

Andrew O'Hehir introduces his interview with Boyle for Salon: "For all the fantastical tangents and attention-grabbing cinematography of his films - who could forget the journey into 'the worst toilet in Scotland'? - he's an old-fashioned tale-spinner with a penny-dreadful novelist's eye for the gory and the grotesque."

Peter Sobczynski talks with Boyle for Hollywood Bitchslap.

Updates, 11/13: "There hasn't been a social drama this decadently over-hyped since City of God," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Lurid, chaotic and maudlin, Slumdog suggests a Baz Luhrmann version of Oliver Twist."

Ella Taylor profiles Boyle for the LA Weekly.

"Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is a stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "As a matter of fact, this film's implausibility is exactly what makes it irresistible. In this post-globalization update of a Horatio Alger tale, all a boy needs to rise to the pinnacle of success is true love, a pure heart, and a run of luck so extreme it can only be karma."

"I wish Danny Boyle had the nerve to trust his audience to take a genuine dose of feel bad with his feel good," writes Marcy Dermansky. "According to Beaufoy's script, the lovely Latika had become the prized possession of a Mumbai gangster, but the movie never deals with the rape this almost certainly entailed."

Erik Davis talks with Boyle for Cinematical.

Update, 11/14: "With its stock characters and often outlandishly contrived plot, Slumdog Millionaire could easily be relegated to the category of cinematic stunt, a penny dreadful for the postmodern age," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. "But even at its most superficial and floridly overheated, this chai-fueled tall tale retains its appeal, largely because of Boyle's fluency with the medium he so obviously loves."

"The film's surface is so dazzling that you hardly realize how traditional it is underneath," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "But it's the buried structure that pulls us through the story like a big engine on a short train."

"Slumdog Millionaire features the simplest story Boyle has ever told, which may explain why its many pleasures are so pure," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Cheryl Eddy talks with Boyle for Pixel Vision.

"Danny Boyle's a hack, but a very special kind," writes Vadim Rizov in the Auteurs' Notebook. "He can never transcend his screenplays, which is too bad because he seems to have no discrimination in picking them out."

Update, 11/15: "Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Slumdog Millionaire is that, despite the director's strenuous denials, it could well be a Bollywood film, 'almost an homage to the 70s masala potboiler' of Indian cinema, the film's co-director, Loveleen Tandan, called it." Somini Sengupta in the New York Times.

Update, 11/17: "Strictly speaking, 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," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "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."

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2008 1:47 AM