The Stranger

A smart, savvy documentary about American remedial education that sounds ordinary only on paper. Director Timothy Hotchner clearly had unbelievable luck with his subjects. The location is unique: A last-chance public middle school in Rhode Island for kids who have fallen behind, UCAP attempts to accelerate its students so they can enter high school more or less on time. The principal is one of a kind—an iron-willed man with a spinal injury that confines him to a wheelchair. And the kids who become Hotchner's subjects, among them a sassy immigrant girl whose parents returned to the Dominican Republic without her, are incredible. This documentary is indispensable because it doesn’t merely worship extraordinary teaching skills. It proposes a unique model for middle-school education, and lets us glimpse the huge investment of resources necessary to sustain it. (Director Timothy Hotchner scheduled to attend.) By Annie Wagner