The Best Chess Movies and TV Shows Worth Your Time
By Cameron W. · Mon, 27 Jul 2026
Chess shouldn't really work on screen. It's two people sitting quietly, thinking. And yet it keeps producing some of the most gripping character studies in film and television, because the board turns out to be a near-perfect stage for obsession, genius, and slow motion collapse.
Chess shouldn't really work on screen. It's two people sitting quietly, thinking. And yet it keeps producing some of the most gripping character studies in film and television, because the board turns out to be a near-perfect stage for obsession, genius, and slow-motion collapse. Here's where to start.The one everyone's already seenIf you've come to chess at all recently, it's probably because of The Queen's Gambit. Anya Taylor-Joy's Beth Harmon, an orphan who claws her way to the top of a male-dominated 1960s chess world while wrestling addiction along the way, turned a Netflix miniseries into a genuine cultural moment. Chess set sales spiked, membership sites crashed, all of it. It earns the hype, but it's also the gateway drug. The rest of this list is where you go next.The classicsSearching for Bobby Fischer (1993) is still the gold standard. It tells the real story of young prodigy Josh Waitzkin, but its real subject is a parent watching a child's talent turn into pressure, and deciding how much of himself he's willing to sacrifice to it. Pawn Sacrifice (2014), with Tobey Maguire as Bobby Fischer himself, tackles similar territory from the other side: genius curdling into paranoia in the run-up to the 1972 World Championship against Boris Spassky. Watch them back to back and you get two very different answers to the same question about what chess does to a mind built for it.The documentariesFiction has to compress; documentary gets to sit with the mess. Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011) is the fullest portrait of Fischer's unraveling, cold war politics and all. Magnus (2016) goes the opposite direction, following Carlsen from bullied Norwegian kid to world champion, and it's genuinely moving in a way the marketing doesn't quite prepare you for. And Brooklyn Castle (2012) might be the most purely uplifting entry on this whole list: a Brooklyn junior high chess team, most of them below the poverty line, out-competing schools with ten times their resources.The ones people missA few titles worth going out of your way for: Queen of Katwe (2016), Mira Nair's account of a Ugandan girl's rise from the Kampala slums to chess titles, with Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo in support. Life of a King, a smaller, warmer film about a Washington D.C. mentor teaching chess to at-risk kids. And Computer Chess (2013), a strange, deliberately grainy mockumentary set at a 1980s programmers' tournament, is the one to watch if you want something that isn't playing the genre straight.Don't skip The Luzhin Defence (2000) either. John Turturro plays a fragile, socially hopeless grandmaster falling for Emily Watson's Natalia at a 1929 Italian tournament, and it's got a very different texture from everything else on this list: part romance, part slow tragedy, all set against the kind of old-world chess pageantry the genre rarely bothers with anymore.What's coming nextThe Carlsen vs. Niemann cheating saga has already produced one documentary – Netflix's Untold: Chess Mates – and A24 is reportedly developing a dramatized feature, tentatively called Checkmate, built around the same scandal. Whatever you make of that whole affair, it's a good sign for chess on screen: the game keeps finding new obsessions worth filming.