Pawn Sacrifice is a 2014 movie directed by Edward Zwick and starring Tobey Maguire as Bobby Fischer, an American chess prodigy. Based on a true story about the first and only American Chess World Champion, this movie, set during the Cold War, really gets into the gritty place the world was in at the time and how that impacted Bobby’s life as a chess star. It greatly affected his mental health, and Maguire delivers a great performance showing his downward spiral. 

The film also stars Liev Schrieber as Bobby’s Russian opponent Boris Spassky, Lily Rabe as his sister Joan, and Peter Sarsgaard as Father William Lombardy, Bobby’s mentor and friend. Steven Knight wrote the screenplay from a story by Knight, Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson.

I am not always a big fan of based-on-a-true-story films, as I feel they have to walk a line between fact and drama and it’s hard to pull off well. my stand-out issue with this movie is that biopics often lead to an anticlimactic conclusion as life rarely has grand finales to end on. However, I still feel it is a good watch for the acting and interesting combination of time period, subject, and setting you won’t often see.