Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 2009 and won eight, the most for any film of 2008, including Best Picture and Best Director. It also won five Critics' Choice Awards, four Golden Globes, and seven BAFTA Awards, including Best Film. Despite the film's success, it is the subject of controversy concerning its portrayals of Indians and Hinduism as well as the welfare of its child actors.

The movie is about the Indian version of the hit TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Dev Patel plays Jamal Malik, a former Mumbai street-kid who has a job making tea at a call centre. He astonishes all of India by entering the show as a contestant and triumphantly getting question after question right. Is he a fraud? A savant genius? Or is something weird going on? His amazing winning streak means he has to come back the next evening for the final big-money question and overnight he is brutally interrogated by Mumbai cops convinced he is a cheat. They take him through each of the questions he got right, and Jamal's life story unfolds in flashback as our hero reveals that each question, like each of Max Bygraves's cards, has a special significance. His tale involves crime, drama, knockabout comedy and romance. Various characters determine his fate: his gangster brother Salim (Madhur Mittal), the love of his life Latika (Freida Pinto) and Prem (Anil Kapoor), the creepy quizmaster himself, who has his own interest in Jamal's staggering success.

This movie has interesting antecedents. It is not the first to be made about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Patrice Leconte's 2006 film My Best Friend, starring Daniel Auteuil, features a nailbiting edition of the French version of Millionaire. Leconte's film, like Boyle's, culminates with a "phone a friend" showstopper and both cheekily suggest the show is transmitted live, when, in real life, it is of course recorded and edited well in advance, at least partly to weed out the cheats.

Slumdog Millionaire is The story of Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is about to experience the biggest day of his life. With the whole nation watching, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" But when the show breaks for the night, police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street kid know so much? Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika, the girl he loved and lost. Each chapter of his story reveals the key to the answer to one of the game show's questions. Each chapter of Jamal's increasingly layered story reveals where he learned the answers to the show's seemingly impossible quizzes. But one question remains a mystery: what is this young man with no apparent desire for riches really doing on the game show? When the new day dawns and Jamal returns to answer the final question, the Inspector and sixty million viewers are about to find out. At the heart of its storytelling lies the question of how anyone comes to know the things they know about life and love.

The Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack was composed by A. R. Rahman who planned the score over two months and completed it in two weeks.[103] Rahman won the 2009 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and won two out of the three nominations for the Academy Awards, including one for Best Original Score and one for Best Original Song, the song "O... Saya" got a nomination shared with M.I.A. and the other song "Jai Ho" won the award and was shared with lyricist Gulzar. The soundtrack was released on M.I.A.'s record label N.E.E.T. Radio Sargam termed the soundtrack "magnum opus and the entire world is known to this fact."

Slumdog director Danny Boyle - whose works such as Trainspotting, The Beach and Sunshine have all featured scores of nearly equal grandeur to the movies themselves - chose Rahman due to his unparalleled success (he's sold over 100 million records and 200 million cassettes worldwide) and ubiquity in the Bollywood world in order to add to the film's authenticity. Planning and completing the score in only two and a half months, Rahman worked out a sharp composite that reflects both the present day electronica/house/hip-hop sector of flashing lights, street life and constant movement, along with the long-inherited Indian flavor of heavy sitars, vibrant tablas and hypnotizing voices.