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100See it, and I dare you not to care about what happens to these kids, these Yankees of chess.
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88Katie Dellamaggiore's inspiring documentary covers two years in the history of the school chess team, during which one team member, Rochelle Ballantyn, approaches her dream of becoming the first female African-American grandmaster in U.S history.
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83As inspirational academic stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.
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83It subtly makes the connection between the simple equation that investment in our children will give dividends that go far beyond any sort of number on a balance sheet.
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80It's a wonderful documentary look at an astonishingly successful public-school chess program that manages to be more moving and heartening than you expect. Which is saying a lot.
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80The feel-good documentary is engaging enough to draw a respectable audience at arthouses, but distribs should work for exposure within communities like the ones this school serves.
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80A sweet testament to the power of intelligence to win over adversity - even in a Brooklyn middle school where the majority of students live below the poverty level.
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80It's deeply satisfying watching these public school, hard-knock kids win, and Ms. Dellamaggiore knows it.
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80It honestly makes no difference if you don't even know the rules of chess and have never visited New York; this is a story about human potential and the lingering possibilities of the American dream.
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Nov 1, 201278Set against a backdrop of deep budget cuts and high-stakes testing, this story makes an eloquent plea for the crucial but endangered role of afterschool programs in public education.
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75You might hope for a bit more depth on the kids Dellamaggiore profiles - perhaps she could have homed in on, say, two of them - but this is really nitpicking. The film is well made and genuinely inspirational.
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75The biggest complaint about Brooklyn Castle is that there's not enough of her. A presence as magnetic as Vicary's demands more screen time. How did she come to chess (a notoriously male-dominated game)? How did she come to 318?
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Nov 2, 201275Enlightening, inspiring and expertly crafted documentary.
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75Brooklyn Castle is an engaging tale, and the principal is wrong: These kids are much more lovable than the Yankees.
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75A great subject goes a long way in this standard but effective entry in the amazing-kids documentary category.
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70We also gain a keen sense of how chess in particular helps otherwise academically challenged kids find a way into their own brains.
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Oct 17, 201267Indifferently structured but centered around charming characters, the documentary starts off as a chronicle of the scholastic chess year, but becomes a compelling plea on behalf of the importance of afterschool programs.
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Oct 18, 201263It pays to consider even the small details of society's greatest investment in the future: our future generations.
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60If the film occasionally bumps up against the limitations of its "Spellbound"-like template, its refusal to ignore the social issues outside of the classroom proves it's more than simply a novelty human-interest story with impressive knight moves.