Slumdog Millionaire was critically acclaimed and named in the top ten lists of various newspapers. On 22 February 2009, the film won eight out of
ten Academy Awards for which it was nominated, including
Best Picture and
Best Director. It was the fifteenth film to win at least eight Academy Awards. It was the eleventh Best Picture Oscar winner without a single acting nomination, the last film to do so until
Parasite in 2019. At the same time,
Taare Zameen Par (Like Stars on Earth), India's submission for the
Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, failed to make the short list of nominations and was frequently compared with
Slumdog Millionaire in the Indian media. It was also the first film shot using
digital cinematography to win the
Academy Award for Best Cinematography, which was given to
Anthony Dod Mantle. In 2021, members of
Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) and
Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) ranked its screenplay 38th in WGA’s 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (So Far). In 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of
The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 163.
Critical response in the US Outside of India,
Slumdog Millionaire was met with critical acclaim. The film holds a 91% approval rating on
Rotten Tomatoes based on 290 reviews, with an
average score of 8.4/10. The consensus reads, "Visually dazzling and emotionally resonant,
Slumdog Millionaire is a film that's both entertaining and powerful." On
Metacritic, the film has an average score of 86 out of 100, based on 36 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Movie City News shows that the film appeared in 123 different top ten lists, out of 286 different critics lists surveyed, the 4th most mentions on a top ten list of any film released in 2008.
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars, calling it "a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating."
Wall Street Journal critic
Joe Morgenstern refers to
Slumdog Millionaire as, "the film world's first globalised masterpiece." Ann Hornaday of
The Washington Post argues that, "this modern-day 'rags-to-rajah' fable won the audience award at the
Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year, and it's easy to see why. With its timely setting of a swiftly globalising India and, more specifically, the country's own version of the
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire TV show, combined with timeless melodrama and a hardworking orphan who withstands all manner of setbacks,
Slumdog Millionaire plays like
Charles Dickens for the 21st century."
Kenneth Turan of the
Los Angeles Times describes the film as "a Hollywood-style romantic melodrama that delivers major studio satisfactions in an ultra-modern way" and "a story of star-crossed romance that the original Warner brothers would have embraced, shamelessly pulling out stops that you wouldn't think anyone would have the nerve to attempt any more."
Anthony Lane of the
New Yorker stated, "There is a mismatch here. Boyle and his team, headed by the director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle, clearly believe that a city like Mumbai, with its shifting skyline and a population of more than fifteen million, is as ripe for storytelling as Dickens's London [...] At the same time, the story they chose is sheer fantasy, not in its glancing details but in its emotional momentum. How else could Boyle get away with assembling his cast for a Bollywood dance number, at a railroad station, over the closing credits? You can either chide the film, at this point, for relinquishing any claim to realism or you can go with the flow—surely the wiser choice." Colm Andrew of the
Manx Independent was also full of praise, saying the film "successfully mixes hard-hitting drama with uplifting action and the
Who Wants To Be a Millionaire show is an ideal device to revolve events around". Several other reviewers have described
Slumdog Millionaire as a Bollywood-style "
masala" movie, due to the way the film combines "familiar raw ingredients into a feverish masala" and culminates in "the romantic leads finding each other." Other critics offered more mixed reviews. For example,
Peter Bradshaw of
The Guardian gave the film three out of five stars, stating that "despite the extravagant drama and some demonstrations of the savagery meted out to
India's street children, this is a cheerfully undemanding and unreflective film with a vision of India that, if not touristy exactly, is certainly an outsider's view; it depends for its full enjoyment on not being taken too seriously." He also pointed out that the film is co-produced by
Celador, who own the rights to the original
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and claimed that "it functions as a feature-length
product placement for the programme." Eric Hynes of
IndieWire called it "bombastic", "a noisy, sub-
Dickens update on the romantic tramp's tale" and "a goofy
picaresque to rival
Forrest Gump in its morality and romanticism."
Reactions from India and the Indian diaspora Slumdog Millionaire has been a subject of discussion among a variety of people in India and the
Indian diaspora. Some film critics have responded positively to the film; others objected to issues such as Jamal's use of
British English or the fact that similar films by Indian filmmakers have not received equal recognition. A few notable filmmakers such as
Aamir Khan and
Priyadarshan have been critical of the film. Author and critic
Salman Rushdie argues that it has "a patently ridiculous conceit."
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, one of the most acclaimed film makers in India during the 1980s and 1990s and a five-time Best Director winner of the
Indian National Film Awards, lambasted
Slumdog Millionaire, calling it in an interview to NDTV: "A very
anti-Indian film. All the bad elements of Bombay's commercial cinema are put together and in a very slick way. And it underlines and endorses what the West thinks about us. It is falsehood built upon falsehood. And at every turn is fabricated. At every turn it is built on falsehood. I was ashamed to see it was being appreciated widely in the west... Fortunately Indians are turning it down."
Academic criticism The film has been subject to serious academic criticism. Mitu Sengupta (2009 and 2010) raises substantial doubts about both the realism of the film's portrayal of urban
poverty in India and whether the film will assist those arguing for the poor. Rather, Sengupta argues the film's "reductive view" of such slums is likely to reinforce negative attitudes to those who live there. The film is therefore likely to support policies that have tended to further dispossess the slum dwellers in terms of material goods, power and dignity. The film, it is also suggested, celebrates characters and places that might be seen as symbolic of Western culture and models of development. Ana Cristina Mendes (2010) places Boyle's film in the context of the aestheticising and showcasing of poverty in India for artistic (and commercial) purposes, and proceeds to examine "the modes of circulation of these representations in the field of cultural production, as well as their role in enhancing the processes of ever-increasing consumption of India-related images." However, there are others who point to the changing urban aspirations and prospects for mobility that can be seen in Indian cities such as Mumbai in which the film is set. The film is seen by D. Parthasarathy (2009) as reflecting a larger context of global cultural flows, which implicates issues of labour, status, ascription-achievement, and poverty in urban India. Parthasarathy (2009) argues for a better understanding of issues of
dignity of labour and that the film should be interpreted in a more nuanced way as reflecting the role of market forces and India's new service economy in transforming the caste and status determined opportunity structure in urban India. Academic criticism has also been extended to the underlying philosophy of the film, with its apparent
ends-justify-means message. Many elements of the film, including the apparent redemption of Salim at the end of his life and the film's subjugation of the suffering of peripheral characters to the romantic aspirations of Jamal, are characteristic, say such critics, of a naïve,
Providence-based vision of reality. == Notes ==