Great 1st two-thirds/ Standard last third

Rating: 7/10 (17 August 2009)

This Oscar winner may not be deserved as a Best Picture of the Year especially compared to the Reader, but it marks a big improvement over the past several Best Pictures especially including Crash and No Country for Old Men - 2 awful movies which prove the utter distaste and clownship that the academy has eroded into recently. At least Slumdog Millionaire is a good movie. It's first half is quite enthralling in setting, pacing, story, and detail. The child-actors completely shine for this movie. Especially captivating were the brothers together dynamically and their adventures (spoiler) into the darker reaches of society with child peddlers and literal garbage heaps. However the story and really the actors by young adulthood seem sort of standard and hackneyed. They're not terrible, in fact satisfactory, but they didn't hold my interest level the way the children and story did earlier. Part of it may have been the sheer grotesqueness of the slums portrayed early on. Slumdog Millionaire's storyline is overall well developed and paced, with a simple and effective narrative. It was one of the better movies of 2008 - for me maybe not an Academy Award winner (I thought The Reader should've taken honors), but a movie with quite a few high points and definitely recommended.