I found the experience of Lion frustrating, but it took me time to understand the depths of my frustration. The film works for about an hour, its first hour, where young Saroo Brierly winds up lost in Calcutta, a place where he knows neither a soul nor a word of the language spoken; the terror he feels at his plight is impressed well upon the audience, and the story is told without much by way of artifice. Then the lost boy is found, he grows up into Dev Patel, and the whole damn thing becomes a pile of boring junk. What a waste. Because writing about movies is my thing, I dug further into the schism dividing the movie’s two halves in my review for Paste Magazine.
A Constant Visual Feast 