Perhaps one of the greatest things about being a movie lover is running across one of those rare, undiscovered gems; the twisting thriller with the audacity to demand that you actually use your brain to solve the mystery, or the outrageous comedy that was just a bit ahead of its time and didn’t find an audience until it was long gone from theaters. Nobel Son is none of those things.

Philandering chemistry professor and recent Nobel prize-winner Eli Michaelson (Alan Rickman) is in Stockholm to collect his award when he and his wife Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) receive word that their son Barkley (Bryan Greenberg) -- a Game Boy-obsessed college student writing his PhD thesis on cannibalism -- has been kidnapped. If they ever hope to see Barkley alive again, Eli and Sarah are to drop $2 million in unmarked bills in the trunk of a display car at a local shopping mall.

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People the world over were struck with sadness and fear recently, as appalling attacks took place in Mumbai, India. The tragic incidents sent shockwaves through the media, but no one could deny that they also served as reminders of the Indian financial capital's ever growing prominence on the world stage. It's the center of the most rapidly expanding economy in the world, the birthplace of the explosive Bollywood movie industry, and the home to both mind-blowing wealth and destitute poverty. So it's no surprise that filmmaker Danny Boyle chose the city as the setting for his newest work, Slumdog Millionaire, a film being touted as a splendid, brutal, thoroughly modern fairy-tale. Recently, Boyle sat down with AllMovie's own Jason Buchanan to talk about the project, and discuss what it was like shooting on location in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi -- a "megaslum" that's home to over a million people, and that Boyle says is actually a thriving, well organized community.

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