Tale of a brilliant, fragile mind slowly crumbling

BOBBY Fischer made all the right moves on a chess board and plenty of wrong ones off it.

His eccentric, unpredictable and often troubling behaviour could inspire followers one minute and infuriate them the next. Pawn Sacrifice is a skilfully-drawn, albeit highly-fictionalised, portrait of a man who believed from young that he was a world-beating genius. He might even have sold himself a little short.

The film, directed by Edward Zwick and written by Steven Knight, focuses on the world championship match between Fischer and Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. It was billed by the media as a confrontation between the superpowers, pitting the brash American against an implacable foe. How …