Slumdog Millionaire

Yet despite a ludicrously misleading advertising campaign, Danny Boyle's cross-cultural masterpiece is unflinching in its ground-level depiction of the streets of Mumbai in which homeless children are abused and exploited while TV screens spew forth win-a-million fantasias. It's a credit to the film-makers that Slumdog is such an uplifting experience, with Boyle focusing on the vitality of the human spirit just as he did in Trainspotting, even as his characters are literally plunging down life's lavatory. Anthony Dod Mantle's vibrant camera races from gutters to rooftops, injecting life into the squalor - there's nothing "abject" about this poverty - while AR Rahman's score keeps the heart pumping and the pulse racing. Full Monty screenwriter Simon Beaufoy works wonders with Vikas Swarup's source novel and the cast, led by Skins star Dev Patel, rise to the challenge with aplomb. Honestly, it's hard to remember a better "best film".

It was, perhaps, inevitable. Following Slumdog Millionaire's eight-Oscar haul on Sunday, life is to imitate art as star Dev Patel is in talks to appear on the real-life version of the show at the centre of the film, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?In the film, Patel plays Mumbai street kid Jamal who finds himself one question away from winning the Indian version of the quizshow. Now, according to the Sun, the 18-year-old actor is being lined up to compete in the ITV1 programme, along with director Danny Boyle, to raise money for Railway Children, a UK-based charity that helps children living rough all over the world. Both shows were created by the TV company Celador, which co-produced Boyle's rollicking crowdpleaser.

Slumdog Millionaire is exactly the kind of exotic, edgy thriller that the new generation of Academy voters on both sides of the Pond absolutely adores. The rags-to-riches story is set in the grubby backstreets of Mumbai. Half the script is delivered in Hindi. And the plot is impossibly shallow.

This being a Danny Boyle movie the precious answers are nailed to brutal scenes. They involve frantic sprints through Mumbai’s crowded markets and grisly flashbacks to medieval slums where the nine-year-old Jamal, and his slightly older psychotic brother, Salim (Madhur Mittal), spend most of their childhood fleeing the clutches of sinister pimps and hungry gangs. It’s terribly Dickensian.

The fairytale power of the film is the way Boyle manages to capture the evolution of the city through the eyes of a child. It’s visually astonishing. The film gets under the skin of the city on every imaginable level. The cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle is an insouciant genius with a camera. You could hang his lush stills of garbage heaps, frowning waifs and skeletal tower blocks in any respectable art gallery. By the same token the film must have been murder to edit.