This updated version, written by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgias and directed by Jonathan Demme, is doggedly, wretchedly earnest.

NEWYORKER: The Manchurian Candidate

It has not made the stone-breakers rich, just slightly less wretchedly poor.

ECONOMIST: Poverty in India

There is the tale of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as W. and E. became, intercut with that of Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a wretchedly married woman living in Manhattan in the late nineteen-nineties and fixated on the myth of Mrs.

NEWYORKER: Material Girls

But growth remains wretchedly slow.

ECONOMIST: South Africa

An amalgam of "Oliver Twist, " "The Three Musketeers" and Bollywood extravagance, it's the saga -- mainly in English, plus some subtitled Hindi -- of a wretchedly poor Muslim boy, played as a young man by Dev Patel, who pulls himself up by his brains instead of his bootstraps, and gets a shot at becoming a millionaire on a wondrously garish Indian TV quiz show.

WSJ: Telluride Thrills