Slumdog Millionaire ★★★★
9.00-11.25pm More4

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Now here’s the pitch: a teenager in Mumbai goes on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers lots of questions. Yeah, right, who’d want to see a film like that? Well, almost everybody, as it turned out. Danny Boyle’s film, starring the impressive young Dev Patel, is of course about a lot more than the quiz show. It’s about the two contrasting Indias – the mega-rich and the desperately poor, the law-abiding and the criminal – and how Patel, an orphan born into poverty, survives between the two by petty theft and confidence tricks and, as we learn in flashback, acquires enough knowledge to get himself on the quiz show. Directed by Boyle with verve and panache, this is a terrific movie, which deservedly won a hatful of Oscars.

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