Lion (2016)

Most people think so. 84% of audiences gave it a thumbs up, by Google's archived audience score. Critics agree, scoring it 76%.

A five-year-old Indian boy gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometers from home. He survives many challenges before being adopted by a couple in Australia; 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family. Wikipedia ↗

Lion is a 2016 Australian biographical drama directed by Garth Davis. Dev Patel stars as Saroo Brierley, a young Indian-Australian man who was separated from his family in rural India at age five when he fell asleep on a train that carried him about a thousand miles across the country to Calcutta. After surviving as a street child and being adopted by a Tasmanian couple, played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham, the adult Saroo uses Google Earth to search for his birth village across an area of India the size of a country, armed only with fragmentary childhood memories.

The film's emotional power built gradually from Saroo's harrowing childhood ordeal, depicted with devastating realism by six-year-old Sunny Pawar in a performance of extraordinary naturalism, through his comfortable but increasingly haunted adult life, to the cathartic climax of his Google Earth discovery and physical return. Dev Patel earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and Nicole Kidman's single extended scene describing why she chose to adopt rather than have biological children was one of the year's most moving performances. Lion earned $140 million worldwide on a $12 million budget and received six Academy Award nominations.