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The Best Chess Movies

The Seventh Seal (1957)
Ingmar Bergman · 31 critic votes
When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life. Tormented by the belief that God does not exist, Block sets off on a journey, meeting up with traveling players Jof and his wife, Mia, and becoming determined to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.
The Chess Game of the Wind (1976)
Mohammad Reza Aslani · 6 critic votes
The first lady of a noble house has died and now there is conflict between the remainders for taking over her heritage.
The Chess Players (1977)
Satyajit Ray · 2 critic votes
In the year 1856, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah is the King of Awadh, one of the last independent kingdoms of India. The British intend to control this rich land and send General Outram to clear way for an annexation. Pressure is mounting amidst intrigue and political maneuvers, but the Nawab whiles away his time in pursuit of pleasure and religious practice. The court is of no help either — noblemen Mir and Mirza ignore all duties and spend their days playing endless games of chess.
Chess (1972)
Edmond Bernhard · 1 critic vote
Filmic essai on different chess methods combined with an adapted sound setting made in collaboration with chess grandmaster Alberic O'Kelly de Galway. Voted for in the Sight & Sound 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll.
A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)
Ryan Trecartin · 1 critic vote
A Family Finds Entertainment chronicles the story of mixed up teenager Skippy and his adventures in ‘coming out’. In this over the top celebration of queerness, Trecartin’s film mines the bizarre and endearing in an unabashed pastiche of ‘bad tv’ tropes. Cheesy video special effects, dress-up chess costumes, desperate scripts, and ‘after school special’ melodrama combine in the fluency of youth-culture lingo, reflecting a generation both damaged and affirmed by media consumption.
Triple Agent (2004)
Éric Rohmer · 1 critic vote
The Popular Front wins elections, the Spanish Civil War begins, and Hitler and Stalin are manipulating and spying. The brilliant exile, Fiodor Voronin, a general at 20, is the deputy at the White Russian Military Union, probably slated to replace the aging Général Dobrinsky soon. Fiodor's Greek wife, Arsinoé, paints and stays away from politics, befriending Communist neighbors. Her health declines; the attentive Fiodor arranges care and, against the backdrop of Stalin's Great Purge, considers his options. He plays a chess game in which love of country, love of Arsinoé, ideology, petty jealousies, and the machinations of power roil in matters of life and death.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016)
Brett Story · 1 critic vote
More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. This is a film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. The film unfolds a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from an anti-sex-offender pocket park in Los Angeles, to a congregation of ex-incarcerated chess players shut out of the formal labor market, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.

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