Because Everybody Else Has One

The title does kind of sum up the film's biggest problems, but I'll be lying if I said I didn't very much enjoy it. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about An out-of-work engineer takes up a substitute teacher job at a severely under-funded, mismanaged public school of mostly Hispanic, sometimes illegal, immigrants but when a diverse group of four students approach him to help them enter a highly competitive robotics competition, he soon finds himself becoming embroiled in his young students' lives far more than he ever expected. Based, somewhat loosely, on a true story. What we thought While there is admittedly what to be sniffy about in this quite obvious and clichéd (yet still mostly true) feel-good drama, I nonetheless found Spare Parts to be one of the most charming and pleasantly surprising minor gems to come out so far this year. Faint praise, perhaps, but that seems oddly fitting for a film that is this unassumingly lovely....