Winner of eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, "Slumdog Millionaire" is a breathless and exciting film, a buoyant hymn to life, and a heartbreakingly effective paean to destiny.

Fanciful, epic and exuberantly paced, "Slumdog Millionaire" chronicles the life of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a dirt-poor orphan who captivates the masses as he wins a fortune on India’s most popular quiz show. Told in non-linear style, the movie switches among harrowing stories of Jamal’s childhood in the slums of Mumbai to his moments of awkward glory as a contestant on the show to his sudden incarceration and ensuing interrogation. It is this questioning by a police inspector (Irfan Khan) that elicits the compelling flashbacks of his early youth.

Some of those memories are deeply disturbing. Jamal recounts terrible cruelties from his impoverished childhood: homelessness, torture, prostitution. He forms a bond with a savvy street urchin, Latika (played as a teen by Freida Pinto), which blossoms into love. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- his traumatic childhood, Jamal becomes a determined romantic. In the process, he acquires knowledge on a wealth of subjects. By the time he appears as a contestant on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," he has absorbed a range of information, keeping him on the show far longer than the smarmy host (Anil Kapoor) finds credible.