Metacritic reviews

The result is a gripping film about a subject almost too good to be true.

If this profile is marred slightly by thematic tidiness and a willingness to overglorify the champion's rise (Fischer didn't even write his best-seller, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess), it still supplies a cracked, conflicted genius trapped in his ceaseless endgame.

A compelling look at the tragic and bizarre life of an enigmatic champion.

Liz Garbus' documentary tells the compelling and powerful story of the late chess prodigy.

Assembly is brisk and high-grade, allowing for the variable quality of archival materials.

The sorry spectacle of the ranting codger never effaces the image of the boy concentrating his entire being over a chessboard. You have to love that kid and pity him.

Bobby Fischer Against the World does not traffic in easy explanations or medical diagnoses, but it leaves the strong impression of a continuity between the oddness Fischer displayed in early interviews and the mania so jarringly evident toward the end.

Beyond the knights and rooks, Bobby Fischer Against the World tells the story of a Jewish kid raised in Brooklyn who spent his final years in exile as a fulminating anti-Semite and a raving anti-American.

Note the noticeable uptick in the cleverness of the on-screen graphics or fitfully remember the movie poster's tagline, "His Greatest Match Was in His Mind," and you'll belatedly come around to the jarring downshift into Fischer's latter-day paranoia and anti-Semitism.

Garbus' over-reliance on interviews that state rather than dramatize Fischer's excellence makes this a portrait that too often seems more overheard than inhabited.