No other big-league TIFF entry manages to combine populist appeal with pop panache as well as this fizzy, frenetic tour of modern India by an Indo-British team led by director Danny Boyle. Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A is the basis for Slumdog Millionaire’s tale of a poor orphan whose tumultuous life somehow makes him an ideal contestant on India’s edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Full of colour and motion, Slumdog Millionaire hurtles forward with great momentum yet rarely puts a foot wrong, even when the story turns toward more familiar melodramatic conventions. But by then it’s become clear that the film is a Bollywood extravaganza in western-appropriate yet still very stylish garb. 

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