Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticA poor young man in India who longs for a life where the grass is greener. A stark but teeming portrait of the squalid underbelly of Indian poverty.
A one-in-a-million shot that could catapult our hero to the place of his dreams. “The White Tiger,” written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, is a movie that clearly owes a major debt — maybe its very existence — to “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008), Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning fable of a former Mumbai street kid looking to flip fortune on its head.
Yet Bahrani (“99 Homes,” “Goodbye Solo”), adapting a novel by Aravind Adiga, is no feel-good fantasist. “The White Tiger” taps engagingly into the rags-to-riches, Horatio-Alger-on-the-Ganges mythology that made “Slumdog.
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