Queen of Chess
Director: Rory Kennedy
Year: 2026
Rating: 7.0
I used to follow
the chess world once upon a time and was familiar with the greats in history
like Capablanca and Steinitz and the more contemporary masters at the time
like Spassky, Tal, Petrosian, Fischer, Kasparov and Botvinnik. I would play
their games with my father and always root against the Russians. But until
watching this 90-minute documentary, I had never heard of Judit Polgar and
her two sisters from Hungary. Kind of amazing in that all three were female
Grandmasters and Judit was the top ranked woman in the world for 26 years
since the age of . . . 12. That says something about how the media treats
women in chess as second-class citizens and perhaps about me as well back
in those days. This was directed by Rory Kennedy, daughter of the great RFK
and brother to the toilet seat cocaine sniffing imbecile. This seems like
an unusual choice for an American documentarian, but I imagine she was drawn
to it by its feminist subject and because it is a really interesting story.
The Polgar father brought up his three daughters
in Communist Hungary when economic times were tough. He went with a grand
and some might say psychotic experiment. His daughters would be immersed
in chess. Home schooling with chess occupying most of their day. And it worked.
All three became fine players at a very young age and more surprisingly none
of them went Bobby Fischer nuts. They won the Chess Olympics while teenagers.
Judit broke Fischer's record of becoming the youngest person to become a
Grandmaster. She played the top men as well and became ranked in the Top
Ten, the only woman to ever do so. Much of the documentary is devoted to
her desire to beat Kasparov, considered the best chess player of all time.
She finally does. A fine documentary with a few talking heads but mainly
the three Polgar sisters being interviewed. The analysys of her games with
Kasparov are pretty dramatic. She retired in 2014.