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Slumdog Millionaire - The plot?  Okay, the plot centers on whether Jamal Malik, a young man from the most desperate of Mumbai slums, is cheating as he tries to win the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?  The police, an evil lot, really want to know.

Critics love this movie, and I did, too, but I offer a word of advice:  India is a country with poverty pretty much beyond our experience here in the United States.  What we call a slum would be a pretty fine place to be for some of the residents of Mumbai slums.  And that poverty, especially as it affects children, is omnipresent in the film.  The film is not about that.  The film accepts poverty and the degradation and abuse it entails as just background noise, as just a sorry fact of life, something the director, Danny Boyle, is not sentimental about at all.  And so this is a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl movie, and on those terms it is a wildly successful movie.  Astonishing cinematography, brilliant use of color, dynamite music. 

I was already familiar with “Paper Planes” by the Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. (which samples “Straight to Hell” by the Clash), but in Slumdog Millionaire it’s perfect.  The Bollywood ending, featuring hundreds of kids dancing in a train station, is oddly satisfying, too.  This film will toss your brain around a bit (Danny Boyle also gave us Trainspotting, another brain tosser, in 1996), but go see it, and try not to get hung up on how lousy life is for many of the filmic people you will meet.  It is, we can all agree, pretty lousy.  But this film has the happiest of endings.       

Frost/Nixon - By the end of this movie, Frank Langella seems more like Nixon than Nixon; he gives a really amazing performance.  The plot on this one?  Nixon resigns, and lightweight

UK talk show host David Frost manages to get Nixon to agree to extensive interviews.  The tension in the film centers on whether Nixon can be made to admit his wrongdoing.  A very effective Ron Howard movie, not quite faithful to historical truth, but pretty close.  Recommended just to see Langella.  In the end, Mr. Frost is not such a lightweight after all.