That the Oscar-winning documentary Undefeated both begins and ends with a loss is just one of the many ironies packed into this uplifting/heart-wrenching surprising-yet-predictable chronicle of the Manassas High School (North Memphis, Tennessee) football team’s 2009 season. Set in the ravaged urban wasteland surrounding a shuttered Firestone plant—a landscape of such brutal and unrelenting poverty that Michael Moore’s blighted Flint, Michigan, looks like Mercer Island by comparison—the familiar Blind Side vérité wealthy-white-benefactor-saves-poor-black-football-player story line would invite cynicism but for the utter awfulness of these kids’ lives, and the dignity and determination with which they overcome it (if only on the football field). It didn’t leave me audibly sobbing like the reviewer next to me, but I can’t deny wiping away a few tears. Yeah, it’s about football, so it helps if you’re into that. But it’s also about race, class, poverty, and, most painfully: dads. Undefeated is a winner, even if ultimately most of the kids it documents aren’t. (GOLDY)