"Pressure Cooker," Bev Pictures, 2009

The zombie genre may be an acquired taste, but there’s hardly anybody who doesn’t like a movie in which underprivileged kids battle long odds with creativity and/or smarts. Of course, it always helps when, as is the case with Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman’s documentary “Pressure Cooker,” there’s a grown-up curmudgeon goading those children forward with tough love and borderline-incorrect harangues.

Wilma Stephenson is a motor-mouthed culinary arts instructor at the predominantly black Frankford High School in northeast Philadelphia. She’s something of a legend in her city’s school system for positioning most of her students for scholarships in top culinary programs. “Pressure Cooker”'s passage through a typical senior year begins with Stephenson screaming at the top of her voice at students who won’t take the extra time to clean their hands and be precise with their seasonings. She gets in their collective faces about their “ghetto mentality” and “McDonald’s palate.” It’s one of the movie’s appealing paradoxes that delicacy and precision has to be achieved through indelicacies and insults.

Of course, everyone who takes these blows to the ego is committed to everything she asks, whether it’s sacrificing holidays and early mornings for kitchen practice or making sure they’re wearing the right wardrobe for scholarship competitions. And you see that makes at least three of her charges go the extra distance. Dudley is a football lineman who transfers his on-field single-mindedness to the crepe pans. Fatoumata is an African immigrant who's desperate to go off on her own to cook professionally. Just as desperate is Erica, who’s spent most of her life caring for her blind younger sister in the midst of a broken family. With the girls especially, you can feel the intensity of their desires push through the screen to such a peak that you fear they’ll explode into puddles if they don’t get what they’re after.

Stephenson herself is such an intriguing blend of Auntie Mame and Sgt. Fury that you wish the movie probed even a little deeper into her own background. But the copious tears she sheds on behalf of her graduates may well be all you need to know -- and more than enough.

Gene Seymour is our guest critic for the month of May.

"Pontypool" opens in limited release on May 29th and "Pressure Cooker" is now open in New York.

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