Pawn Sacrifice

Reykjavík, 1972: Bobby Fischer against Boris Spassky. The match had become something other than chess, with Nixon and Kissinger following the results. Edward Zwick's film is about the collapse rather than the victory. Fischer's conviction that the Soviets and the KGB were working against him, the hotel room changes, the complaints about camera noise, are presented not as eccentricities but as symptoms. Tobey Maguire stars and produced. Liev Schreiber plays Spassky, and one of the film's better decisions is drawing him not as an opponent but as another man under the same pressure. Shooting began in Iceland in October 2013 and continued in Montreal and Los Angeles. It premiered at Toronto in 2014 and opened in the United States on 16 September 2015. Reviews were favourable, especially for Maguire: 72 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 65 on Metacritic. The box office was dire, taking 5.6 million dollars worldwide against a 19 million budget. Who it is for: viewers interested in chess and the cultural front of the Cold War. Who it is not for: anyone expecting an accounting of what Fischer said in later years. The film stops in 1972 and does not open that.