The best chess films and television, and what each gets right

The Queen's Gambit (2020)

Netflix called it their most-watched scripted limited series at the time, and it is the most accurate drama on this list. Bruce Pandolfini and Garry Kasparov consulted; the positions are legal and the tournament mechanics are right.

It also did something no other production on this page managed: clubs, retailers and online platforms all reported a surge of new players afterwards, and reporting at the time suggested an unusual share of them were women and girls. Those figures are estimates from the platforms rather than audited numbers, but the direction was not in doubt. We have a whole piece on what the series gets right and what it invents.

Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)

The best film about chess, and it is barely about chess at all — it is about what adults do to a gifted child. Based on Fred Waitzkin's book about his son Josh, with Ben Kingsley playing Bruce Pandolfini, who was Josh's real coach.

The chess thing worth knowing: the climactic combination was composed for the film. It is not Josh Waitzkin's real championship-winning game, the rival 'Jonathan Poe' is a fictionalised composite rather than a straight portrait of any one player, and analysts have argued the final position does not entirely hold up. Online transcriptions of it disagree with each other, which is a good reason to treat any diagram of it with suspicion.

None of that matters to the film, which is why it is first among equals here. The scene where Josh offers a draw to a boy who could have beaten him is worth more than any accurate position.

Pawn Sacrifice (2014)

Tobey Maguire as Bobby Fischer, Liev Schreiber as Boris Spassky, and the 1972 Reykjavík match as a Cold War proxy — which it genuinely was, to an extent that needs no exaggeration.

The chess is real, drawn from the actual games, though the timing is compressed and the psychology heightened. The single move above is the film's best chess moment and it needs no dramatisation at all: in Game 6, Fischer opened 1.c4, having played 1.e4 almost exclusively for his entire career. Spassky, who had spent months preparing against 1.e4, was on unfamiliar ground from the first move. He lost, and — this part is documented and remains extraordinary — applauded.

That is the whole appeal of chess on film in one gesture, and no screenwriter invented it.

Queen of Katwe (2016)

Disney, directed by Mira Nair, and the true story of Phiona Mutesi, who learned chess in a Kampala slum and represented Uganda internationally. Her coach, Robert Katende, is a real person and the programme he ran was real.

It is the most straightforwardly inspiring film here and the one most likely to work on a child. The chess is incidental; the point is that the game is portable, cheap, and completely indifferent to where you were born.

Brooklyn Castle (2012)

A documentary about the chess team at IS 318, a Brooklyn middle school where most students are below the federal poverty line and which has won more national championships than any school in the country.

For any parent wondering whether a school chess club is worth supporting, this is the argument, and it makes it without a single motivational speech. Watch it for the budget-cut subplot, which is the least chess-related and most affecting part.

The documentaries about the giants

• Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011) — the definitive Fischer documentary, and unsparing. Sits alongside Pawn Sacrifice rather than duplicating it.
• Magnus (2016) — Carlsen from childhood to the 2013 world title. Best on the strangeness of an ordinary-seeming person with an extraordinary machine in his head.
• Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (2003) — the 1997 Deep Blue match. Sympathetic to Kasparov's grievances, which is a point of view rather than a fact; watch it knowing that.

The interesting oddities

• Computer Chess (2013) — a shaggy, largely improvised film about a 1980s computer-chess tournament, shot on period video equipment. Very funny if you have ever been in a room with that kind of person, baffling otherwise.
• The Dark Horse (2014) — the true story of Genesis Potini, a New Zealand speed-chess player with bipolar disorder who taught Māori children. Bleak and excellent.
• Critical Thinking (2020) — John Leguizamo's film about the Miami Jackson High team that won a national championship. Uneven, but the chess-as-a-way-out story is real.
• The Luzhin Defence (2000) — from the Nabokov novel, with John Turturro as a grandmaster losing his grip. The most literary entry, and the least interested in accuracy.

The historical curiosities

• Chess Fever (1925) — a Soviet silent comedy that cut real footage from the Moscow 1925 tournament into a farce, including José Raúl Capablanca. Twenty minutes, and genuinely funny a century later.
• The Chess Players (1977) — Satyajit Ray's film, in which two noblemen play chess while the British annex their kingdom around them. One of the great films on this list by any standard other than chess content.
• Dangerous Moves (1984) — a world championship match as Cold War thriller. Won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, which no other chess film has.

What the good ones have in common

None of them try to make you understand the position. That is the lesson, and it is why the films that focus on faces and rooms and hands work better than the ones that cut to the board and expect drama from it.

The other thing they share is a specific honesty about cost. Chess at a high level takes something out of people, and every film here that is any good is at least partly about that. The ones that treat chess as a straightforward triumph are the forgettable ones.

The folklore worth not repeating

• The final game in The Queen's Gambit is not a historical game played to its real end. It is reported to be built on Ivanchuk–Wolff, Biel 1993, with a composed finish.
• The climactic combination in Searching for Bobby Fischer was written for the film, not played by Josh Waitzkin, and its soundness has been questioned.
• Beth Harmon is not based on a specific real player. The era is real; she is not.
• Fischer did not resign Game 1 in Reykjavík out of temperament. He lost it after 29...Bxh2, a genuinely bad move in a position that should have been drawn.