Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle)
Role Models (David Wain)
Sex Drive (Sean Anders)
Defiance (Edward Zick)
Hannah Takes the Stairs (Joe Swanberg)

Watching Slumdog Millionaire is like being run over by a carnival. It is a colourful way to go, if you don’t mind being cut short in your prime. But you cannot help thinking that back then – in your prime (an hour or a minute ago) – you were enjoying plain life and reality, while there is none of either in Danny Boyle’s feelgood Mumbai tale. It explodes like a street festival, from the early scenes of scampering poverty and tragedy, filmed like demented out-takes from City of God, to the 20m rupee climax on an Indian television version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, whose previous questions, pinning the hero Jamal (Dev Patel) to his spotlit dreamtime, have been spaced through this multiple-flashback movie to structure and punctuate it.