Bobby Fischer Against the World (Liz Garbus, 2011)

Chess like the mathematical and musical fields (and unlike such fields as literature which require an understanding of the world and a mature outlook) periodically produces child prodigies and there is no better example of a chess wunderkind than Bobby Fischer. Today, if asked to name a world famous chess player most people would name Fischer, if any at all. Partly this is down to his epic 1972 championship in Reykjavik as the much as the curious path his life took after 1972. Liz Garbus's documentary film follows many recent narrative documentaries such as Man on Wire or One Day In September in mixing archive footage with recent interviews with the leading players, commentators and ordinary people who witnessed events at the time.

The film follow three acts with his early years leading up to 1972, the 1972 World Championship, and finally Bobby Fischer's decline and fall from grace. It seems inevitable that his odd and eccentric upbringing could produce a chess genius such as Fischer. What is also inevitable is that that same hothouse upbringing sowed the seeds of his downfall. Having no real interests outside chess he would spend hours every day practising chess, reading chess books, playing games against himself at the age of 15 he became the United States Chess Champion. Early interviews show a diffident boy seemingly overwhelmed by the attention but also showing the first glimmers of an ultimately arrogant and difficult man. We also see that even in the early 1960s he was fascinated with the conspiracy theories that later took over his life as he talks about the dangers of radiation from TV sets and fluoridation of drinking water. This delusional behaviour became worse over time culminating in the full-scale paranoia, if not outright madness.

Never an easy man to be around he never was one to do the expected thing or follow the usual career path that those around him wanted for him. When he was readying himself for the 1972 match against the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky it was almost as if the Cold War were being fought by proxy complete with accusations of psychological warfare from both sides. Fischer seemed to resent the responsibility that he was being asked to shoulder and almost never made it to Iceland. Henry Kissinger, the soon-to-be US Secretary of State, personally intervened to try to persuade him to go. Even when he got to Reykjavik it was a moot point whether he'd meet Spassky across the chessboard. He was an hour late for the first game and failed to turn up for the second, thus automatically forfeiting the game. Two games down he pulled back his passive-agressive behaviour a little and began to win his games. This middle section is fascinating: a chess championship that made world headline news, even managing to push Watergate from the top story for a while. Fischer won the championship in typically muted fashion and refused (yet again) the done thing: the fanfare and ticker-tape parades that others may have seen as his right after his apotheosis at Reykjavik. Instead he immediately entered what the headline writers like to call "the wilderness years" where he tried to return to obscurity all the while allying himself with one crakpot idea after another. It was also around this time that the son of a Jewish mother (and probably a Jewish father) started publically spouting the virulent anti-semitism which blighted his legacy.

While watching the film I was reminded of the recent book "Perfect Rigor" by Masha Gessen about the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman, an equally eccentric genius who like Fischer gave it all up when it seemed that he could have capitalised on his recent triumph. (Perelman was awarded the $1 million Clay Millennium Prize after solving the Poincare Conjecture - he refused the prize and turned his back on mathematics.)

The question of whether it was chess that drove him mad is left unanswered. Thankfully the notoriousness of such things as his ridicule of the US at the time of 9/11 and attack on the World Trade Centre is kept at a minimum and is not allowed to overshadow his achievements on the chessboard. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said "there are no second acts in American lives." It is a tragic waste of talent.

Dying from acute renal failure and refusing life-saving medical treatment his last words were reputedly "Nothing is as healing as the human touch." He is buried in Iceland, the country where he saw his greatest triumph and which following his trouble with US immigration granted him citizenship.

It's as if Bobby Fischer's life was Nabokov's The Luzhin Defence as rewritten by Philip Roth: the chess genius who loses his mind and becomes a scabrous self-hating Jew fulminating against the world and all those in it who fail to recognise his genius.

A real American Tragedy indeed.

Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

A former CIA agent trains his daughter to become an assassin as they hide out in a log cabin in the Arctic Circle.

Here's another teenage girl with problems but unlike Fish Tank's Mia the problems are slightly more fantastical than winning a dance competition or falling in love with her mother's boyfriend.

Saoirse Ronan plays assassin Hanna, a ghostly-looking teenage girl, who we first meet killing a moose in the snowy wastes. Eric Bana plays her father Erik Heller, a rogue CIA agent on the most-wanted list since losing his German wife Johanna.

Cate Blanchett plays the villain Marissa Wiegler, an over-the-top CIA agent obsessed with oral hygiene, in a similar vein to her turn as an OTT KGB agent in the last Indiana Jones film. She wants Hanna and her dad terminated with extreme prejudice, as these assassin types always say. Tom Hollander puts in an hilariously camp turn as the sadistic Isaacs, a German nightclub owner with bleached blonde-hair and euro trash clothes, flanked by two skinheads with bomber jackets and DMs.

Is this film a fairy story dressed up as a spy thriller or a spy thriller in the style of a fairy tale? The film’s beginning is straight out of the Brothers Grimm with a fairy-tale cottage in the forest where a huntsman and his daughter live undisturbed by the outside world. Or they did until they turn on the GPS tracker so Cate Blanchett can begin hunting them down.

Like the average Bond film the action travels about a fair bit from Arctic Finland to Morocco to Germany though no Bond film I ever saw had 007 hiding out in a VW camper van with a family of Bowie-singing hippies. (Perhaps Daniel Craig should give it a go in the next one...) There's even time for some half-baked exposition about altered DNA and super assassins along the way too.

If it sounds like the proverbial curate’s egg in many ways it is but remarkably the film works which is in no small way due to Joe Wright's solid confident direction. The Chemical Brothers provide a throbbing kinetic soundtrack and the actors manage to keep straight faces throughout.

Although Hanna has a plot that strains at credibility it is a film that looks great and has style in abundance as befits the director of Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement. (Like both those films it features a bravura Steadicam sequence filmed in one take - here Eric Bana enters a Berlin subway station followed closely by a few of Marissa's agents.)

It’s no classic certainly but this brilliant slice of nonsense is worth two hours of anyone’s time.

Limitless (2011, Neil Burger)

A wannabe writer known more for his drinking than his prose enters into a Faustian pact when he becomes hooked on an experimental smart drug called NZT which increases his intellect.

Limitless is a great thriller with a wry sense of humour. When we first see Eddie Morra (played by Bradley Cooper, of The Hangover fame) he’s dressed like a roadie for Pearl Jam with long straggly hair and is immediately dumped by his go-getting editor girlfriend (Abbie Cornish). What was she doing with this loser anyway? The Inciting Incident (as Robert McKee would have it) is a meeting with his ex-wife’s brother who we infer used to be a small-time drug dealer (and might still be). He gives Eddie a clear pill called NZT which when taken increases his intellect exponentially. A few scenes later Eddie is dressed in a smart suit, with a fashionable short haircut, looking more like the suave Bradley Cooper we’ve seen in the A Team and the Hangover films. Imagine if we could all take a pill just to iron out our sartorial crimes (let alone allowing us to learn Italian in a weekend) I think the drug companies might be onto a winner...

But into each life some rain must fall... The rain in Eddie’s case comes in the form of Gennady, a crazy Russian gangster he’s borrowed some money from with which to invest on the stock market. Silly boy. (Gennady is played by Andrew Howard, an actor surprisingly from Port Talbot in Wales and not St Petersburg.) Robert De Niro has a few scenes as a tycoon called Carl Van Loon (think Donald Trump minus the comb-over) who is impressed enough by Eddie’s new-found intellect that he asks him to broker a major corporate merger. Anna Friel, playing Eddie’s ex-wife and Abbie Cornish, so good as Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about John Keats, take on the other main roles.

Leslie Dixon’s screenplay sticks (for the most part) closely to the plot of The Dark Fields, the source novel by Alan Glynn. It’s always tense when one of your favourite novels is adapted by Hollywood but this is one rare occasion where the author needn’t disown the film. (Incidentally, I still think the Great Gatsby-inspired title The Dark Fields is better than Limitless but that’s a minor quibble.) Style-wise it owes something to David Fincher’s Fight Club, as well as some visual touches from Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (I’m thinking particularly of the representation of cascading stock market figures via some clever CGI effects).

Neil Burger, previously best known for enjoyable magician romp The Illusionist with Edward Norton, has made an extremely enjoyable and stylish film with solid performances and hyper-kinetic cinematography. One of the most purely enjoyable films of the year so far, Limitless is a thriller that I can unreservedly recommend to anyone.