The Lottery

Should a quality public education be left to chance? It’s one of several questions raised in this utilitarian documentary, which follows four families (two from Harlem, two from the Bronx) as they wait for the annual “lottery”—a process that randomly selects a fraction of applicants for charter schools and leaves the rest on the outside looking in. Director Madeleine Sackler favors an agenda of advocacy over complexity, making The Lottery an effective, if unapologetically one-sided, piece of agitprop.