It's pretty great

Rating: 9/10 (17 November 2015)

Now I wasn't alive in the 80's when Fischer was rising in the world, so this is coming from someone who didn't even know the name Bobby Fischer until this movie.
Now I need to say that I love this movie. It shows some of the struggles of his early childhood and his fascination with chess. His mother says that even if she takes the pieces away, "he just keeps playing in his head." Not only does this movie show Bobby Fischer's slow descent into madness and paranoia, and it does an excellent job of it, but it even goes so far as to explain why this happens. Apparently because of the sheer complexity of the game, chess masters who devote their entire lives to the game can't handle it. As the movie states, "their are more forty move games than stars in the sky." Thats crazy if you ask me.
The cinematography is excellent and brilliantly shines in some scenes. I'm going to call out one in particular here. It was when Fischer was staying in the house before the championship match and his agent was trying to get in. His agent was knocking on the door trying to get in, but the way Bobby saw it was loud pounding on door and heard him speaking in Russian and saw footsteps under the door, imagery from the beginning of the movie when his mother held a party for her Communist friends. When the agent finally gets in, he finds that Bobby has torn apart the room trying to find a bug as he thinks the Russians are spying on him. This scene shows just how far removed from reality he was. Even his opponent is mad as he thinks there is a bug in his chair.
At the end of the movie they tell a little about the rest of Fischer's life. He did get a arrested for vagrancy (My friend who was watching with me looked that up and it means being homeless. Kind of a stupid crime.) and eventually died in Iceland.
I think that Tobey Maguire gives an excellent performance in this film and it just might be my favorite of 2015 (at least until the new Star Wars comes out!).