Apperently you don't need $300 Million to make an engaging film.
Start with an original slice-of-life tale, good enough acting, and overall decent direction (though done in a cinema verité style, so feeling more documentary in form than slickly edited), and you have a movie with an emotional heart - much more than a superhero blockbuster.
I call the story original because I didn't know what to expect in the upcoming scenes. While the framework might in synopsis seem like an old cliche, the movie was just so evenly paced from beginning to end that you could almost call this a "reality motion picture" since you just step into one man's life and his experiences. You quickly feel that you know these people - or at least see them in your community - and with such intimate observation you may even begin to care about them, and hopefully want their lives to improve.
I might even give it more than an 8 except that it is so low budget (reportedly $40,000 Canadian) that aspiring filmmakers will feel that they could readily make this themselves on their smartphone with home computer editing - and they'd be right.
But they'd need a story worth watching first. And that this is.