Pawn Sacrifice certainly whips up a dervish of energy, and as a piece of dramatic entertainment, it's mostly engaging, and features character actors doing very good work.

As volcanic as Maguire needs to be, it’s those who react to Fischer most tellingly — Sarsgaard’s priest, and Schreiber’s Spassky — that make Pawn Sacrifice the gripping and entertaining history lesson that it is.

It's best appreciated as a tragicomic profile of a man whose extraordinary talent was undermined by the farcical political reality in which he was enmeshed.

A classically helmed biopic that brings nothing new to the genre, but benefits from handsome craftmanship and solid performances by Tobey Maguire as the Brooklyn boy wonder, and Liev Schreiber as his longtime Russian nemesis, Boris Spassky.

Absent the ability to really get the audience’s heads in the game, the film succeeds better at presenting chess as a subtle metaphor for the psychological warfare being waged behind the scenes.