Ravishing portrayal of India in Danny Boyle's uplifting narrative

We first see Jamal (Skins star Dev Patel), a slum orphan turned call-centre teaboy, being tortured by police. He's poised to win 20 million rupees on Mumbai's version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Naturally, they assume he's cheating. In flashback, therefore, Jamal explains how a devastatingly hardscrabble life nonetheless furnished him with prizewinning answers.

We see Jamal and his brother Karim lose their mother in a religious riot, escape mutilation (to make them better beggars) at an orphanage, turn to petty crime and eventually fall out over their fellow runaway, Latika.

In these parts of the story, Boyle's hyperkinetic camera captures perfectly the commingled beauty, horror and energy of India - tourists photographing patchwork saris drying by a river, rag-pickers alongside office blocks - and his child actors are wonderful.

Although the Indian co-director Loveleen Tandan must take some of the credit, Slumdog Millionaire has the same sense of youthful resilience as Boyle's earlier film Millions, but much more scope and heart.

The older Jamal's undying love for Latika (a spellbindingly beautiful Freida Pinto) is Bollywood-slushy, however, although true to the modern subcontinent, the bad guys are gangsters and cops, and the fairy godmother is cash.

It's not Dev Patel's fault that his scenes slow the film down. Scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy hasn't entirely finessed Vikas Swarup's source novel, Q&A, into a taut cinematic narrative.

Since we know almost the final result, the quiz show build-up lacks tension. The police also turn surprisingly mild and attentive to Jamal's story after their early enthusiasm for electrodes.

Slumdog Millionaire deals in the clichés of fairytale and also of India, but weaves them together into something novel and pleasing. It is not an out and out success, but like every Danny Boyle film, it is unique.