Life of Pi

An Indian youth (Suraj Sharma), shipwrecked while emigrating to Canada with his family, finds himself in a lifeboat mid-Pacific Ocean with the wreck's only other survivors: a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a tiger. Soon, it's just our hero and the tiger, both hungry and desperate. Yann Martel's award-winning novel becomes, in the hands of writer David Magee and director Ang Lee, one of the great adventure movies of all time, while not ignoring the spiritual undercurrents in Martel's book. The movie is brilliant in every sense of the word, evoking Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli and Shere Khan one moment, The Story of Little Black Sambo (without the racism) the next, and cradling it all in magical realism. Cinematography (Claudio Miranda) and visual effects (Bill Westenhofer) are beyond superb, as is Sharma, who has never acted before.