LION

Dev Patel has become a true leading man and displays not just his acting skills in this film, but his new broad shouldered hunk physique that the women I know who have seen it really appreciate, and lots of guys too. But despite that appeal, the movie is stolen by Sunny Pawar, the little-boy actor in the poster above. The first half of the movie is about the main character getting lost as a boy and the trials and tragedies he witnesses and experiences. Pawar is so compelling on screen, along with the other Indian actors in that part of the film, that I could have gone on watching just them for the rest of the movie.

The second half, with Patel and Nicole Kidman doing some brilliant acting, is less compelling because it is more character study, involving a pursuit played out on a computer, so a lot less physically adventurous and more mentally. Nonetheless, as someone who lost his mother over a half century ago, when I was a young man, and has always, even as a boy, felt compelled to mine the past for clues to the present, this story of a young man searching for his roots works so well as a moving drama, I recommend bringing along more than one packet of tissues.

Especially for the almost mandatory shots at the end of the film of the real people LION is based on. That's when I just lost it, I was so moved by the reality of what I had just experienced as the movie version. So, if you want a real catharsis, the kind most dramatic true-story movies like this promise but rarely provide, go see LION immediately.