Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Abegail Noëlle While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Uriah43 Things were very different during the days of the Cold War. The Soviet Union dominated their sphere of the world and they used chess as a propaganda tool to demonstrate the superiority of communism for all to see. As a result they pooled a substantial portion of their resources into cultivating and maintaining the best chess players the world had ever seen. And they weren't hesitant to stack the deck against anybody who dared to oppose them. Accordingly, for over 30 years they were successful in keeping any non-Soviet from challenging their World Champion. But everything changed when a young chess genius named Bobby Fischer came onto the scene from humble beginnings and with only one desire—to be the best chess player in the world. Unfortunately, although he was an expert in chess, he was a novice in personal and public relations and it was this flaw which would come to haunt him in later life. To that end, this documentary is similar to watching a train wreck in slow motion. You can see it coming but you're still hoping that it will somehow end differently. Anyway, this is a good film that doesn't require anybody to know anything about the game in order to understand it. And while I wish it had dealt a bit more on some of his earlier triumphs and featured more from some of his heavyweight opponents like Tigran Petrosian and Bent Larsen, it was sufficient for the most part in showcasing the rise and fall of an American star. Slightly above average.

Dhaval Vyas For those who do not play chess or know anything about it, the game is something that is commonly referenced in books, poetry, movies, etc. It is seen as somewhat of a metaphor for happenings in real life. For those who play chess and are in love with the game, it is something of an art or science, or something cosmic that is unexplainable. They may often be frustrated as to why the majority of society does not share their passion.Chess has survived for thousands of years and is arguably the hardest game in the world. Through the eons, if there is one name or one master that has towered above anyone else, it is the American Bobby Fischer. When Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in 1972, the match created more publicity than any other chess event in history (even more than when IBM's computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1996). A lone American had defeated the mighty Soviet chess machine during the cold war. What should have been just the beginning of an already great career for Fischer, it was actually just the end.Bobby Fischer made one of the great disappearances of any famous person of the 20th century. He did not die, but was as elusive as Bigfoot after he won the world championship. For those who encountered him only would end of becoming frustrated because they realized he was slowly going insane. 20 years after winning the Championship (1992), Fischer reappeared to play Spassky for another match. When he appeared, it became even more obvious that the man had lost his mind. When the September 11th attacks happened, Fischer shocked the world when he applauded the acts on a radio program. He never played again and passed away in 2008.This HBO program is fantastic in that it is presented in a manner that is suitable for those who barely know anything about chess or those who know the intricate details of Fischer's career and life. It keeps the viewers' attention by playing nice music in the background throughout. The program shows numerous photographs and television footage that most people have never seen. The central focus of the program is the Fischer - Spassky match of 1972, but it juxtaposes all kind of other topics such as Fischer's family and love life, and his affiliation with a cult group. The program even has Henry Kissinger talking about the match. Kissinger had encouraged Fischer to follow through with the match when Fischer was about to not show up. But, the program does not blame Fischer's religious obsession with chess for this mental breakdown. It posits that it could have been a possibility.I will have to strongly disagree with one part of this documentary. It stated that when after Fischer won the world championship, he was arguably the most famous man in the world (aside from Jesus). I find this really hard to believe. One because Fischer was a merely just a chess champion and (2) there were many other gigantic figures at that time; Muhammad Ali, Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao, just to name a few.In the end, the enigma will always remain the enigma. Nobody really knows why Fischer quit playing after 1972 or what caused his mental disintegration. Even though he forfeited his title to Karpov in 1975, why did he completely give up playing even tournaments and simuls altogether? What we are left is speculation. Many chess lovers will proudly proclaim that Fischer was the best player of all time. There maybe some truth to this, but I believe Garry Kasparov finally deserves this title. This is because Kasparov was willing to take on all comers, human beings or computers. Kasparov did this for almost 3 decades. Kasparov defeated an ongoing Champion Anatoly Karpov (one of the top 5 players ever) 5 times and he continued to defend this title beating brilliant and talented young players - Ivanchuck, Shirov, Topalov, Anand, Short, Leko, Kramnik, Kamsky, and so many others for another 2 decades.*Please do not comment if you are going to get into a "greatest ever" debate - it will be yet another endless discussion and will lead to nowhere.* Fishcer's story is one of the great tragedies of chess, but in the short time that he was brilliant, he shined so brightly that it continues to illuminate to this day. Although his life ended to a sad decline, keep in mind, we remember and admire him for what he produced.

Spiked! spike-online.com It's hard to imagine that a game of chess could capture the attention and imagination of millions; that a chess champion could become an international star, chased by the press and greeted like a hero on tarmacs around the world. Yet that is precisely what happened in the early Seventies, when the 29-year-old American Bobby Fischer took on the 35-year-old Russian Boris Spassky in the most notorious chess match in history: the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland.This historical event is dramatically recounted in Liz Garbus' new documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World. The film explores the rise and fall of the chess world's bad boy: from a poor, self-taught child prodigy to a venerated world champion and, finally, a reviled paranoiac. The film divides Fischer's life into three parts, with the middle centring on that famed 1972 match in Reykjavik.The trajectory that the film traces is rather clichéd, but along the way it does raise a number of intriguing questions: What is the nature of genius? What does it take to make a champion? What are the causes of mental illness? The film hints at how the young Bobby Fischer was affected by growing up without a father and being raised by a lefty mother in a poor Brooklyn household at the height of red-baiting. It looks at how fame affected Fischer, a recluse who cherished privacy, and it explores the nature of the game of chess itself, the mental as well as physical stamina it requires. The film also shows how Bobby and Boris became pawns (if willing ones) in the Cold War stand-off between the US and the USSR.Considering its wide scope, it is neither surprising nor disappointing that Bobby Fischer Against the World raises more questions than it answers. Garbus largely leaves it to the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what to make Fischer's life and personality. The documentary intersperses newsreel footage, still images by photographer Harry Benson (who was granted unique access to Fischer), and talking heads that include Henry Kissinger, Fischer's brother-in-law, his chess contemporaries, various fans and historians.One of the interviewees refers to Fischer as 'the Mozart of chess'. Indeed, he started teaching himself the game at the age of six, spending all his free time studying strategies and playing against himself. Just a few years later he was frequenting chess clubs in Manhattan and soon he was taking on up to 40 adults at a time. At 14, he became the youngest US Open Champion ever.By contrast, Spassky's home country was a place that talent-spotted, honed and coached their chess players. In the Soviet Union, chess was not just a sophisticated boardgame, but a matter of collective, national pride.So when the two players went up against each other in Iceland, the match was loaded with symbolism. As another chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, says in the film, Fischer was 'representing the entire free world'. At the time, an American TV news bulletin put the latest news about Fischer above the Watergate scandal and soaring unemployment in the US. And when the notoriously demanding and elusive chess champion at first failed to show up in Iceland, Kissinger himself called Fischer up, urging him to go.In an interview after his World Championship win, Fischer said he felt like something had been taken out of him. Having achieved the ultimate accolade, Fischer became more and more of a recluse and failed to defend his title three years later. For the chess world, this was a great betrayal.Fischer only resurfaced for a bizarre 'comeback' 20 years later in a 1992 re-match against Spassky in the former Yugoslavia, which was then under United Nations sanctions. Fischer ended up winning the rematch, but the price was high. He was indicted by the United States for defying a presidential ban against commercial dealings with Yugoslavia, facing fines and a 10-year prison sentence if he returned. His old friend and bodyguard managed to secure him citizenship in Iceland, where he died in 2008.When he returned to the public eye in 1992, Fischer was wild-haired, podgy and virulently anti-Semitic. Although both his parents were Jews, Fischer got mired in conspiracy theories, reading pamphlets about the Illuminati and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In a radio phone-in just after 9/11 he gloated over the Twin Tower attacks. Having been paraded in front of cameras as an American hero as a child, and taken pride in beating the Russians as a young man, at the end of his life Fischer was an outcast and a self-made enemy of the state.Bobby Fischer Against the World suggests that there is something about the game of chess that not only attracts, but also contains or focuses great minds. As an interviewee in the documentary notes 'A good chess player is paranoid on the board, but then if you take that paranoia to real life it doesn't play so well'. Once chess was no longer his sole obsession, Fischer seems to have begun to imagine that there were some hidden strategies behind people's every move. And he is not the only who comes off as paranoid in the film. In the course of the 21 individual games that Fischer and Spassky played during those three summer months in Iceland, Spassky claimed that his opponent was using electronic and chemical devices to control and unsettle him. A thorough police search of the room where the match took place failed to find any such devices.In the end, Garbus' film makes no excuses for Fischer's despicable views while at the same time showing that, regardless of his disappointing private ending, Fischer's remarkable achievements still remain an inspiration.

asc85 I was 11 years old in 1972, and I remember the whole Bobby Fischer/Boris Spassky thing. I was also aware of what happened to Fischer in his later years. So I'm familiar with the story, but by now means an expert. The film got mostly good reviews, so I was very interested in seeing this, and learning more about Fischer. However, there was hardly anything new in this documentary that I didn't already know about (and remember, I'm by no means a Fischer expert), and close to an hour of this film revolved around the Fischer/Spassky match. If you know nothing about Bobby Fischer, this is a good movie, but if you know nothing about Bobby Fischer, why would you see this movie in the first place? I see that this film won an award for Best Documentary at the Newport Beach Film Festival. I knew nothing about this festival, but the fact that a film like this could win ANY type of award does not make me think that the Newport Beach Film Festival will soon be rivaling Sundance or Cannes.