Knights of the South Bronx

At Community Elementary School 70 in the Bronx, teacher David MacEnulty turned his pupils into tournament chess players, and those kids went on to win the New York City and New York State championships. 'Knights of the South Bronx' takes that true story and changes the names and some of the details. It's an A&E TV movie directed by Allen Hughes, who'd made 'From Hell' with his brother Albert Hughes and would later direct 'The Book of Eli'.

Ted Danson, a long way from the arrogant bar owner he played in 'Cheers', is Richard Mason, an executive who gets fired for blowing the whistle at his company. His wife Pat (Kate Vernon) is watching the bills pile up and suspects a midlife crisis, but he takes a job as a substitute teacher anyway, with a fourth grade class in the South Bronx. A lot of the kids have a father in prison or a mother on drugs, and hardly any of them listen to him.

Things change the day Jimmy (Malcolm David Kelley), the class clown, spots him in the park playing fourteen games of chess at once and winning every one. He wants Mason to bring the board to school, and the rest of the class gets hooked fast. Mason tells them that once you sit down at the board it doesn't matter how much money you've got or where you're from, and he builds a team that starts entering bigger and bigger tournaments.

Keke Palmer, Clifton Powell and Devon Bostick round out the cast, and Kelley was playing Walt in 'Lost' at the time. It was shot in Toronto, and the real MacEnulty taught the young cast the basics of chess and makes a brief cameo.

A&E premiered it on 6 December 2005, and Danson got a Screen Actors Guild nomination for best actor in a TV movie or miniseries, which went to Paul Newman. Critics were split: The New York Times called it one of the good examples of a tired genre, DVD Talk dismissed it as pure formula, and the site's average sits at 62.5 out of 100.

• Drama