Lion (2016)

This is another great, touching film.
Saroo (Sunny Pawar) is just a little boy growing up in India, with too much responsibility though his older brother, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) has much more, as they are a family of laborers and then little Saroo insists on helping his brother lift hay bales but is too tired and Guddu leaves him at the train station, but Saroo wakes up and wanders onto the train looking for his brother and then the train starts moving.
It doesn't stop until it reaches Calcutta which is 1200 kilometers away and he doesn't even speak the proper language, Bengali, he only knows Hindi. Though the orphanage isn't a great place, it is better than the streets and the pimp he was almost sold to. And fortunately, he is one of the lucky ones, soon adopted by the loving and kind Australian couple the Brierleys John (David Wenham) and Sue (Nicole Kidman). Things go so great with Saroo that they adopt another the following year, but this boy is troubled and hits himself and it doesn't improve with age. 
Saroo (now Dev Patel) grows up well but doesn't think much about his past until he takes a hotel management class in Melbourne where he meets other people from India, along with the American Lucy (Rooney Mara, wasted in this role) and upon seeing some traditional Indian candy, all of his memories come flooding back. For the next four years he is torn apart inside, struggling to find his hometown using Google Earth, the internet and his faint memories. He believes that this will tear his mother apart as his brother, Mantosh (Divian Ladwa) will disappear for days at a time. Fortunately, when he finally does break down and tell her, she is supportive and wants his biological mother to see how great he became. 
The reunion is moving and I cried. After all those years, his mother never gave up hope that he was still alive and would come back to find her, which he did, after twenty-five years. However, his brother, whom he believed spent years sobbing over losing his brother, was in fact, dead, had died the same night Saroo wandered off. 
It might be a simple film, but it is everything, showing how adoption is. In this case, John and Sue believed the world already had too many people in it, so they took care of some people already in it, such a touching reason.
While the film is great I do have some problems with it. I would have liked to have seen Saroo actually being a success when I mostly just saw him searching on the internet and having angst and difficulties in dealing with all the unanswered questions surrounding his childhood. The only time they mentioned something else was when his father visited upon hearing he quit his job. Also, Lucy was almost a non-character, barely serving a purpose and Rooney Mara is too good of an actress for a role like that. Kidman and Patel were excellent though. I would also have liked a little more with the troubled Mantosh, maybe mentioning what was wrong and if they tried to get help, though one can assume they would. 
The rest of the film, including the scenes in India showing how poor and crowded the country is is done with grace and realism. Also interesting is that Saroo learns he mispronounced his name when he was young, it is actually Sheru which means lion, the title of the film. And this whole thing was based on a true story, showing how powerful the internet can truly be. Grade: A-