'Pawn Sacrifice' takes all of those tropes and cranks them up to 11, far past the barometers of either believable human behavior or credible filmmaking.

Full Review | May 3, 2016

Like all of Zwick's works, it's perfectly watchable fare, but it's often infuriating for its refusal to dig deeper into its incredibly compelling subject.

Full Review | Oct 14, 2015

Fine-looking but safe ...

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 25, 2015

Archived news reports and a Dick Cavett interview fit seamlessly into the dramatic recreations, as do era-specific rock tunes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 24, 2015

Despite his best emoting, Maguire ultimately comes across as Peter Parker with a mole and a bad haircut.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 24, 2015

Genius is fascinating, particularly when it is complicated, as it always seems to be.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 24, 2015

It's Hollywood hokum hugged around a sour little arthouse movie trying to chew its way out.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 24, 2015

Features a showboat performance from Tobey Maguire as the increasingly disturbed Fischer, along with a more composed one from Liev Schreiber as the taciturn Spassky.

Full Review | Sep 23, 2015

The suspense of Pawn Sacrifice is getting Fischer sane enough so that he can sit down across from his opponent and focus. We end up as impatient as those poor souls sitting in Reykjavk, looking at our watches.

Full Review | Sep 20, 2015

There's much to recommend it... thanks to some sharp lines from screenwriter Steven Knight and first-rate performances.

Full Review | Sep 18, 2015

The challenge of "Pawn Sacrifice" was to capture the colorful Cold War '70s, the inner strategies of one man's paranoid mind and make chess cinematic. Check, and mate.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2015

Edward Zwick's "Pawn Sacrifice" is an enthralling piece of mainstream entertainment that captures the essence of Fischer's mad genius, perfectly re-creates the tenor of the times AND works as a legit sports movie about the great game of chess.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 18, 2015

A sad example of the inherent difficulties of dramatizing a cerebral face-off like the 1972 battle royale between chess masters Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 18, 2015

There are other good performances, including a small one by Peter Sarsgaard as Fischer's chess trainer, but overall this is a film in which, as the end credit documentary footage attests, the real story overwhelms its dramatization.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 17, 2015

Zwick, who made the exceptional nuclear thriller, "Special Bulletin," once more proves his gift for generating suspense in his handling of the chess games the whole world watched in the early 1970s.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 17, 2015

There's pleasure in the film's look and the dialogue, but director Edward Zwick overworks his presentation - too much exposition, too many closeups, too many bits of period footage, too many visual gimmicks - and neglects his characters and situations.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 17, 2015

In one of his strongest and most impressive performances, Maguire goes all in on Fischer's quirks and insecurities. Although Fischer is unquestionably a genius, he's not an easy person to like, and Maguire brilliantly gets that point across.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 17, 2015

Screenwriter Steven Knight sticks with the popular notion that genius and lunacy grow on the same vine, which doesn't tell us much about Fischer in particular but certainly conforms to the sad trajectory of his life.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2015

Biopics are a dime a dozen, but Tobey Maguire gives such a transfixing, transformative performance as chess master Bobby Fischer that you're hooked.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 17, 2015

Is anybody better at playing a dotty, preoccupied genius than Tobey Maguire?

Full Review | Sep 17, 2015