A film of remarkable sensitivity and insight.

A riveting screen adventure.

Writer-director Steven Zaillian proves as much of a prodigy as his chess-playing subject, turning out a film that is a beautifully calibrated model of honestly sentimental filmmaking, made with delicacy, restraint and unmistakable emotional power. The feelings it goes for are almost never the easy or obvious ones, and the levers it presses are all the more effective because of that.

One of the craftiest and most satisfying pieces about gender politics to come along in ages.

Even though this film may do for chess what "The Red Shoes" did for ballet, it works movingly and most effectively as a family drama.