Lion

A boy of five becomes separated from his older brother at a railway station in central India and, after weeks surviving alone, is adopted by a couple in Tasmania. Two decades later, settled in Australia and unsettled by returning images, he begins piecing together fragments of memory to find the town and the family he lost.

Serious critics admired the film's two halves unevenly. The early Indian passages, carried almost wordlessly by young Sunny Pawar, drew the strongest response for their immediacy and fear. Reviewers singled out Dev Patel's restrained adult performance and Nicole Kidman's turn as the adoptive mother, though several judged the later search more conventional than the harrowing opening that precedes it.

For a psychodynamic clinician, the film sits close to early separation and loss, the slow formation of attachment within a second family, and the quiet persistence of origins across adult life. It attends to how fragmented childhood memory can press on a settled present, and to an adoptive parent's own account of why she chose this child.