Lion

Reviewed by: Marc Wells

Score: 10/10

Recommendation: Buy the blu-ray. Or the digital copy. Or both.

Summary: A beautifully told story of a lost boy finding his family after 25 years.

Review: Lion is an award-winning film from the end of 2016 that flew under the radar of many people, including myself. When I did finally notice the film in early 2017, I wrote it off pretty quickly as a film I wouldn't be interested in. Then my father-in-law told us that we needed to watch it and asked us every week for a month if we had watched it yet. Finally we sat down and watched, and I was blown away. If I could go back and rewrite the "Top 10 Movies from 2016" post, I would easily add this movie as a top pick.

Lion is about a young boy, Saroo (played by Sunny Pawar), who gets separated from his family while trying to help provide for them in backwater India. After months of living on the streets, escaping from multiple dangerous situations, he is taken to an orphanage, where he is then adopted by a couple from Australia (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman). Years later, and adult Saroo (played by Dev Patel) remembers bits and pieces of his past. He is haunted by those memories, and they push him to extremes to find his home.

The acting in this movie is fantastic, particularly on the part of Dev Patel and Sunny Pawar. When people say that child actors really steal the show, they must be thinking of Sunny and his phenomenal acting job. Before this role, Sunny was found literally living in a slum of India, but he has a natural talent for acting. Even as I write this review, I am tearing up thinking about young Saroo's experiences and the way that Sunny portrayed him. He easily steals the show, and it will stick with you.

In the end, this movie is incredible and will blow you away. It is easily worth buying, and I have shown it to multiple friends already. The story is masterfully told, the cinematography is beautiful, and the characters are well developed. This movie is a gem, and I am glad that this movie didn't fly under my radar forever, as I would have been missing quite the experience.