Movie of the year: 100% rating for Brooklyn Castle!

All New Yorkers who care about kids and who care about our public schools should see the wonderful movie, Brooklyn Castle, about the national chess championship team at IS 318, in Williamsburg Brooklyn, with an amazing cast of characters and more drama than you can believe.  It even has a 100% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
 
There is a screening hosted by GothamSchools this Sunday at 1:45 PM at Lincoln Center, discount tickets available for teachers and students. 

It’s a terrifically involving film whether you know anything or not about chess.  The vivid personalities, relationships and storyline capture your heart; and provide an antidote to the anti-public school poison we’ve gotten lately out of Hollywood. 

See this review by Andrew Hehir of Salon: “Brooklyn Castle”: An inner-city school where chess legends are made : 

Among other things, “Brooklyn Castle” washed the noxious taste of the teacher-bashing drama “Won’t Back Down” (which I’m delighted to say was overwhelmingly rejected by the public) right off my palate. Whatever sins the teachers’ unions may have committed, and however many unemployable drunks they’ve housed in “rubber rooms,” if they’re protecting the jobs of teachers like Elizabeth Vicary I’m on their side. A bone-skinny redhead with an unplaceable accent who seems to burn with intense inner fire, Vicary is the chess teacher who has transformed I.S. 318, a school where upward of 70 percent of the student body live in poverty, into the nation’s junior-high chess powerhouse.

For once, the truth is told: the real villains are NOT teachers but the DOE’s heartless, repeated budget cuts.  Go see it!

“Brooklyn Castle” opens this weekend at the Lincoln Center and the Sunshine Cinema in New York. It opens Oct. 26 in Los Angeles, Nov. 2 in Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Denver, Knoxville, Tenn., Minneapolis, Washington and Austin, Texas; and Nov. 9 in Charlottesville, Va., Philadelphia and Seattle, with more cities to follow.