Pawn Sacrifice

This biopic of troubled Brooklyn-raised chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer centres on the 1972 world championship match with the USSR's Boris Spassky, a sporting occasion emblematic of the era's Cold War tensions. "World War Three on a chess board" is how one commentator describes it, but Tobey Maguire's bristling performance as Fischer shows that geopolitical pressures and unprecedented global attention were not the only factors bearing down on this maverick talent. The screenplay, by TV's Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, looks back to his unsettled childhood with an absent father and political activist mother as the source of an anti-Soviet paranoia that verged on delusional psychosis by the time of the championship decider. Ed Zwick's direction struggles to make high-level chess accessible to a wide audience, but the point that Fischer's addled mind and brilliantly creative tactics appeared to go hand in hand comes across clearly. Overall, a slightly superficial skim though a remarkable life, but engrossing enough while it's on.