movie review queen's gambit

The Queen’s Gambit

When you read the words “Netflix limited drama series about addiction, obsession, trauma, and chess,” the first adjective which springs to mind is probably not “thrilling.” But here we are, and “The Queen’s Gambit,” Scott Frank ’s adaptation of Walter Tevis ’ coming-of-age novel of the same name, absolutely demands the use of “thrilling.” Anchored by a magnetic lead performance and bolstered by world-class acting, marvelous visual language, a teleplay that’s never less than gripping, and an admirable willingness to embrace contradiction and ambiguity, it’s one of the year’s best series. While not without flaws, it is, in short, a triumph. And it is satisfying not just as a compelling period drama, a character study, and a feast for the eyes. It’s also, at its heart, a sports movie wrapped up in the vestments of a prestige TV series. Ask yourself this: When is the last time you fist-pumped the air over chess? Isn’t that something you deserve?

Odds are that Beth Harmon (the remarkable Anya Taylor-Joy ) will earn quite a few fist-pumps as people discover Frank and co-creator Alan Scott ’s excellent series. We meet Beth as an eight-year-old (Isla Johnson) when she’s left impossibly unharmed—physically, at least—by the car crash that kills her mother. Her father’s not in the picture, so Beth finds herself at a Christian school for orphans. While there, she develops three things: a friendship with Jolene (newcomer Moses Ingram, excellent), a passion for chess, and a physical and emotional dependence on the little green tranquilizers fed to the children until they’re outlawed by the state. When she finally leaves the school, she’s got those last two things packed in her suitcase alongside a bunch of chess books, a sizable ego, some unexplored trauma, and no small amount of self-loathing. But it’s the game that drives her, sending her both to the heights of the competitive chess world and, increasingly, to her hoard of pills and the oblivion offered by alcohol.

In short, Beth has a lot to handle. Luckily, Anya Taylor-Joy is more than up to the task. Playing Beth from 15 onward, Taylor-Joy gives the kind of performance that only becomes more riveting the longer you sit with it. It’s a turn of both intoxicating glamour and precious little vanity, internal without ever being closed-off, heartbreakingly vulnerable and sharply funny, often at once. Much of the story hinges on when and how Beth is alone—and sometimes she’s most alone when surrounded by people—and Taylor-Joy’s performance is particularly remarkable in these moments. Scenes of Beth alone in her home, in a stranger’s apartment, on a plane, in her bed at night—they all hum with the kind of energy that only arises when one is truly unobserved. In this case, however, she’s creating that energy in a room full of cameras and crew members. That kind of honesty and release is the stuff of acting legend, like Eleanora Duse’s blush . It’s yet another high watermark in a young career already full of them, and somehow she’s never better than when Beth is sitting silently behind a chess board.

We’ll come back to those scenes, but it would be a mistake to assume that Taylor-Joy’s only great scene partner is the camera, gazing from across the 64 squares of the board. Frank and casting director Ellen Lewis assembled an ensemble of heavy-hitters, including the great Bill Camp as the isolated janitor who introduces Beth to the game, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Harry Melling as rivals and eventual allies in the chess world, the wonderful (if underused) Ingram, and director Marielle Heller , who gives a hypnotic performance as the fragile, damaged, compassionate woman who eventually welcomes Beth into her home. There’s not a dud in the bunch; even the actors who show up for a scene or two at most give performances that feel fully inhabited. It’s a stunner of an ensemble.

And here’s a bonus: they all look incredible. “The Crown” is rightly praised for its sumptuous, detailed production design and costuming, and “The Queen’s Gambit” will likely find itself compared to its Netflix predecessor with some frequency. But for all the strengths of “The Crown,” it rarely showcases the kind of imagination on display here. Costume designer Gabriele Binder , hair and makeup head Daniel Parker , and production designer Uli Hanisch (the latter of “ Cloud Atlas ,” “Sense8,” and “Babylon Berlin”) do much more than capture the look and feel of the 1960s in the United States and abroad. They use that aesthetic to illuminate Beth’s mindset. When does Beth embrace the wilder aspects of ‘60s makeup? Why, when she’s balancing precariously on the edge and her thick eyeliner serves to make her look even thinner and more fragile. That’s one example of many. It’s incredibly thoughtful and stylish. Consider it isolated breakdown chic.

The aesthetic of Beth’s inner world is also explored, though to detail what that looks like and what it means is to diminish some of the pleasure (and anxiety) it engenders. Just know that it lends Beth’s struggles a visceral energy that most stories of addiction tend to either take for granted or overplay. And for the most part, that care and thoughtfulness is found in all of the tropes present in “The Queen’s Gambit” (and there are plenty of tropes—this is a sports movie in disguise, after all). That said, Frank’s largely excellent teleplays do occasionally stumble, particularly when it comes to race (Jolene deserves better) and gender. The latter is a shortcoming shared with Frank’s “Godless”—both have their hearts in the right place, but are perhaps not as thoughtful or insightful when it comes to sex, love, and the realities of a patriarchal society than they believe themselves to be.

Frankly, it’s hard to get too worked up about those shortcomings thought, especially when the chess starts. The chess! My god, the chess. Like any good sports movie, this character-driven period drama lives and dies by its editing. Editor Michelle Tesoro should go ahead and buy a bookshelf for all the hardware she’s about to pick up for “The Queen’s Gambit” right now; the chess sequences are all electric, and each in its own way. One will make you hold your breath. Two will likely bring you to tears. Some are funny. Some are infuriating. Some are, somehow, very, very sexy. Each is electric, and Tesoro and Taylor-Joy make them so through skill, talent, and precision. (Some credit here is also due to chess consultants Bruce Pandolfini and Garry Kasparov. I know very little about chess, but somehow “The Queen’s Gambit” convinced me otherwise and dazzled me all at once.)

Every truly great sports story has not one, but two beating hearts. There’s the sport itself, a game or competition in which the viewer becomes undeniably invested. And then there’s the player or players, someone whose life is much bigger than the game, yet is nevertheless somewhat consumed by it. “The Queen’s Gambit” has both those hearts, and both are racing. Frank, Taylor-Joy, and company never stop telling both those stories at once, and the result is a fascinating portrait of a young woman fighting to become the person she wants to be, battling for victory and for peace. When her journey brings her to Paris, she remembers the words of a woman who loved her and spends some time wandering museums, feeding her soul with something more than chess. Yet there’s never any doubt that somewhere, in some corner of her mind, she’s got her eyes on the board. What a privilege it is to see that corner and see the world’s beauty, all at once. 

Now available on Netflix

Allison Shoemaker

Allison Shoemaker is a freelance film and television critic based in Chicago.

• Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon
• Harry Melling as Harry Beltik
• Thomas Brodie Sangster as Benny
• Chloe Pirrie as Alice Harmon
• Marielle Heller as Alma Wheatley
• Allan Scott
• Scott Frank
• Walter Tevis
• Carlos Rafael Rivera
• Michelle Tesoro

Cinematographer

• Steven Meizler

Leave a comment

Now playing.

Across the River and Into the Trees

You Gotta Believe

The Becomers

The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat

Between the Temples

Blink Twice

Strange Darling

Latest articles

Experience the Star Trek Movies in 70mm at Out of this World L.A. Event

Home Entertainment Guide: August 2024

Netflix’s “Terminator Zero” Takes Too Long to Develop Its Own Identity

Prime Video’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is the Boldest Fantasy Show of the Year

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ Starring a Magnetic Anya Taylor-Joy, Is a Shrewd Study of Genius: TV Review

Following the astonishing rise of an unusual chess prodigy, Netflix's new limited series is a welcome change of pace.

By Caroline Framke

Caroline Framke

Chief TV Critic

• How Streaming TV Turned the Premier League Into a Great American Pastime 2 years ago
• FIFA, Qatar and Cowardly Hypocrisy Has Sucked the Joy Out of Watching the World Cup 2 years ago
• ‘Pitch Perfect: Bumper In Berlin’ Is a Spinoff Without A Purpose: TV Review 2 years ago

In order to be a truly great chess player — not just a good one, but one of the greats — you need to possess a canny combination of concentration, acuity, and nerve. What seems like a simple board of 64 squares quickly becomes a battlefield; the key to winning the ensuing fight is being able to analyze and anticipate an opponent’s moves without your face betraying a single calculation. Chess is such a mentally punishing, esoteric game — which makes it extremely hard to portray onscreen with half the thrill it might have in reality, especially if the viewer doesn’t know all the rules (and chances are, you don’t). But “The Queen’s Gambit” manages to personalize the game and its players thanks to clever storytelling and, in Anya Taylor-Joy , a lead actor so magnetic that when she stares down the camera lens, her flinty glare threatens to cut right through it. Most crucially, the series uses chess as its engine for a more complicated narrative about female genius, the allure of addiction and the gift of autonomy. 

Related Stories

Reality TV Survived the ’07 Writers Strike. Why Is It Hurting in 2024?

Primetime TV Sees Ad Dollars Fall in Upfront for Second Year, but Streaming Lends Boost

From writer and director Scott Frank (“Logan”), and based on Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel, “The Queen’s Gambit” tells the story of a taciturn orphan whose unflinching demeanor and analytical brain reveal her to be a lethal chess prodigy. When we first meet 9 year-old Beth (Isla Johnston) in   Kentucky circa the early ’60s, she’s adjusting to life at a Kentucky orphanage while quietly mourning the sudden death of her mother (Chloe Pirrie). Then, a chance encounter with the custodian (Bill Camp) introduces her to chess, and it’s as if the game unlocks a secret room within her own mathematical mind where everything makes sense, a place where she can be safe and in control. That Beth discovers this about herself at the same time as the orphanage is giving her a daily tranquilizer only intensifies her obsession. She spends years lying awake at night, high as a kite, staring at her ceiling where ghostly apparitions of chess boards appear to let her play as many games as she wants. In these moments, “The Queen’s Gambit” almost becomes an “Alice in Wonderland” story — except in this case, the heroine is an unsettling orphan playing chess on her ceiling through a drugged fog. 

Popular on Variety

The series, written and directed entirely by Frank, sometimes threatens to get overwhelmed by these breaks in reality and format, and the CGI chess pieces are only occasionally as sinister as they’re supposed to be. At the show’s bluntest moments, Beth’s time in the orphanage and early childhood flashbacks often feel like they’re of an entirely different show. But as Beth grows up (and is subsequently played by Taylor-Joy), “The Queen’s Gambit” becomes very shrewd about its choices and keeps the narrative going at an impressively fast clip — making it a sharp, welcome contrast to the all too many lethargic streaming dramas out there. 

Unfolding over seven episodes, the limited series follows Beth’s rise to the top of the competitive chess world and all the work she does and the suffering she endures to get there. Growing up, her closest ally is the custodian and her bunkmate Jolene (Moses Ingram); once she leaves the orphanage, her confidante becomes her adoptive mother Alma ( Marielle Heller ), a lonely woman in need of company outside her spiteful husband. Ingram makes the absolute most of sometimes clunky dialogue (Jolene is the only major non-white character in the series, and it shows). And while Heller’s mostly known for her patient, empathetic directing of films such as “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” she brings the same qualities to her acting here, deepening Alma’s characterization into something so painfully tender she might as well be a walking bruise. Both flesh out characters that most obviously show Frank’s limits as a writer, giving them welcome depth beyond the page.

While Jolene and Alma get the closest to cracking Beth’s heart, she’s otherwise constantly surrounded by men. She resents that fact being pointed out to her with every chess match she obliterates, but with her shock of bright red hair and increasingly glamorous wardrobe (courtesy of costume designer Gabriele Binder), Beth also takes some pleasure out of drawing everyone’s intrigued eye. Along the way to the top, she collects the hearts of men equally frustrated and enthralled by her: a sincere local boy (Henry Melling), a fellow cocky prodigy (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a kind-eyed writer (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) who comes the closest to stealing her heart right back. Even the steely Russian champion (Marcin Dorocinski) whose face rarely moves an inch finds himself drawn to this strange girl and her astonishing mind. Countless chess matches begin and end on Beth’s face as she stares coolly across the board at her opponent, waiting for the moment she can strike him down. In most actors’ hands, these scenes would become too boring for words. In Taylor-Joy’s, they’re mesmerizing.

It’d be easy for the show to indulge too much in Beth’s allure and make her some sort of Manic Pixie Dream Genius, and it doesn’t always resist the temptation. But more often than not, it dives deep enough into her psyche and reveals enough weaknesses that she’s never invincible or unknowable. She’s a mastermind, but also an angry obsessive with a healthy ego and a love for obliterating herself before anyone else can do it to her. She wants to win, but more than that, she wants some place — someone — to call home. When “The Queen’s Gambit” gives both Beth and Taylor-Joy the room to tap into the twin veins of her fury and longing, it’s the best kind of bildungsroman. What could’ve just been a clever show quickly becomes a portrait of a special, flawed person that reveres her fire as much as her brilliance.

“The Queen’s Gambit” premieres Friday, October 23 on Netflix.

• Crew: Executive producers: Scott Frank, William Horberg, Allan Scott.
• Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Marielle Heller, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Moses Ingram, Harry Melling and Bill Camp.

More from Variety

‘Rings of Power’ Bosses on New Parts of Middle-earth, Last-Minute Visual Effects and Why They Haven’t Changed Course From Season 1

‘Star Wars Outlaws’: Disney Tests Gamers’ Appetite for Hollywood IP

‘Rings of Power’ Director Charlotte Brändström Explains Sauron’s Origins in Season 2 Premiere, Why Celebrimbor Is Like Oppenheimer and Directing 200 Orcs (EXCLUSIVE)

‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Star Lloyd Owen to Headline RSC’s Political Drama ‘The New Real’ (EXCLUSIVE)

2024 Live Music Business Is Driving Record Revenues, but Some Data Points Raise Concerns

Amazon to Launch ‘Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Season 1 for Free on Samsung TV in Viewership Push Ahead of Season 2

More from our brands, this hisense smart tv deal is the best $200 you can spend online today.

Robb Recommends: The All-Natural Incense You’ll Want to Burn All Fall and Winter

Caitlin Clark, Fever Set Attendance Record With Olympians Watching

The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists

Outer Banks Sets Two-Part Season 4 Release — Watch the Pogues’ New Treasure Hunt Get Underway in First Trailer

Advertisement

Supported by

‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Review: Coming of Age, One Move at a Time

Anya Taylor-Joy plays a brilliant and troubled young woman who medicates herself with chess in Scott Frank’s mini-series for Netflix.

• Share full article

By Mike Hale

Openings matter a great deal in chess, and “ The Queen’s Gambit, ” a new Netflix mini-series about a wunderkind of the game, uses its first few minutes for the purposes of misdirection. A young woman wakes up in a disordered Paris hotel room and washes down some pills with minibar booze while racing to dress for a Very Important Game of Chess. The period is the late 1960s and the vibe is Holly Golightly groovy wild child.

But “ Gambit ,” whose seven episodes premiere on Friday, pulls that particular rug out from under us right away. It jumps back a decade or so, to when Beth, the fictional future prodigy (played as a child by Isla Johnston), is placed in a Kentucky orphanage after surviving the car crash that kills her mother. It’s a repressively parochial place that keeps the girls sedate by feeding them tranquilizers from a big glass jar, but the awkward, introverted Beth finds another kind of escape when she discovers chess.

This opening episode — written and directed, as is the whole series, by Scott Frank (“Godless”) based on a novel by Walter Tevis — has an enchanting, storybook feel. Beth stumbles on the game when she’s sent on an errand to the basement lair of the orphanage’s forbidding custodian, Mr. Shaibel (a canny, finely etched performance by Bill Camp). The game immediately makes sense to her — when nothing else in her life does — and at night she runs through the moves he teaches her on an imaginary board she sees among the shadows of the prisonlike dormitory where she sleeps.

From there, as Beth (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy ) is adopted out of the orphanage and her prowess gradually gains public notice, “Gambit” proceeds straightforwardly through her teenage years, showing us how she becomes the glamorous but troubled chess pro of that opening scene. It follows the beats of a sports tale, like a classic Hollywood boxing film, but it’s also a coming-of-age story about a woman succeeding in a male-dominated world, and a restrained spin on an addiction saga, as Beth rises in the chess hierarchy on a steady diet of alcohol and downers.

Frank wraps it all up in a package that’s smart, smooth and snappy throughout, like finely tailored goods. The production has a canny combination of retro Rat Pack style, in its décors and music choices, with a creamy texture, in its performances and cinematography, that is reminiscent of another Netflix period piece, “The Crown.” (This connection is reinforced by the abundance of British actors playing the American roles, including Taylor-Joy and, as three mentors and competitors for Beth’s affection, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and Harry Melling.)

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

• Action/Adventure
• Children's/Family
• Documentary/Reality
• Amazon Prime Video

More From Decider

New Shows & Movies To Watch This Weekend: 'Pachinko' on Apple TV+ and...

'Unfinished Beef': Netflix Reveals Hosts For Labor Day Hot Dog Showdown...

Andy Cohen Asks Brandi Glanville To Watch Him And Kate Chastain Have Sex...

Peacock Has Removed Raygun and the Entire Olympics Breaking Competition...

'WWHL': Bowen Yang Says One Terrible 'SNL' Host Once Made "Multiple Cast...

Peacock's Gary Coleman Doc Questions The Late Child Actor's "Suspicious"...

11 Best New Movies on Netflix: August 2024's Freshest Films to Watch

'Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles' Star Josh Flagg Gives Update On His...

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to copy URL

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ On Netflix, Where A Young Chess Prodigy Deals With A Crippling Addiction

Where to stream:.

• The Queen's Gambit

Anya Taylor-Joy Talks The Use Of AI In 'Furiosa' on 'Live': "It’s Strange To See Your Eyes And Mouth On Somebody Else’s Face"

'the big cigar' episode guide: how many episodes in andré holland's apple tv+ drama, stream it or skip it: 'monsieur spade' on amc/acorn tv, where clive owen is a retired sam spade solving a brutal killing in the south of france, 'monsieur spade' episode guide: how many episodes are in clive owen's amc crime drama.

The late Walter Tevis wrote  The Queen’s Gambit all the way back in 1983, a year before he died of lung cancer. It seemed like the novel was just as hot a property with Hollywood as his other novels, like  The Hustler and  The Color of Money . But it took 37 years to find its way to the screen, but it seems like it’s arriving at a good time, when viewers are looking for a nice, meaty limited series to binge. From what we can see, this is going to be that kind of series.

THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We hear someone knocking on a hotel room door, asking for a “Mademoiselle” in French. A woman climbs out of a bathtub, where she supposedly passed out.

The Gist: The woman, hungover after a night of god-knows-what, opens her curtains, retrieves her shoes from the bar pulls herself together and runs down to the master chess game that she’s participating in. Her name is Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy). We soon go from Paris in 1967 to Pennsylvania in the ’50s. Nine-year-old Beth (Isla Johnston) is left unscathed after a car accident that killed her mother Alice (Chloe Pirrie), and since her dad is nowhere to be found, Beth is is sent to an orphanage called The Methuen Home.

There, she’s greeted by the overly-friendly headmistress Helen Deardorff (Christiane Seidel), and one of the first things she does is get uppers and downers (i.e. “vitamins”) from Mr. Fergusson (Akemnji Ndifornyen). There she also meets an older girl named Jolene (Moses Ingram) who enjoys flouting the rules, like not taking the “vitamins” when given and liberally calling people “cocksucker.” But, as expected, she feels lost and adrift.

She wanders into the basement one day and sees the custodian, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp) playing himself in chess. Beth knows nothing about the game but is fascinated. As she learns to take the tranquilizers at night, she envisions chess openings and moves on an upside-down board she envisions on the ceiling. She keeps going down to the basement to play him on Sundays; every time she improves in leaps and bounds, to the point where she eventually beats him.

Seeing her remarkable ability, Shaibel invites the chess coach from the local high school to see for himself. After playing her, she invites her to his club to play every member simultaneously. She wipes the floor with them, but not before jonesing for the green “vitamins”, which are locked away after the state gets wind of what the orphanage is doing. As withdrawal gets to her, Beth takes desperate measures to get those vitamins.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Though based on Walter Tevis’ novel and not real-life people,  The Queen’s Gambit gives off that same regal vibe that we’ve seen on  The Crown . The addiction-fighting-with-genius story, though, goes way back to Sherlock Holmes, all the way through period dramas like  The Knick .

Our Take: Though we don’t see a lot of the adult version of Beth in the first episode of  The Queen’s Gambit , we were sucked into her story anyway, mainly due to the performances of Johnston and Camp. Camp is especially good at playing the gruff custodian, smarter than anyone at the school realizes, who is content with sitting in the basement nipping from a flask and practicing opens and defenses.

Allan Scott and Scott Frank have done a fine job of adapting the long sought-after 1983 novel and exploring the phases of Beth Harmon’s life as she rockets up the ladder of the professional chess world while simultaneously battling a crippling addiction that may or may not help her game. We know that her mother was a mathematician that became a suicidal recluse due to drugs, mental illness or both, so it’s not a stretch that Beth may suffer from those same tendencies.

It’s fascinating to see that her addiction was kicked off by her orphanage’s highly questionable policy of drugging their residents. No one at the orphanage is portrayed as downright evil, but they are just creepy enough to put us in Beth’s wary shoes. Even the fact that Shaibel is down in the basement all day playing chess is creepy, but the gruff custodian is actually the warmest character at the orphanage, because he sees Beth’s individual genius, whereas everyone upstairs just sees her as another annoying kid.

What this sets up, of course, is Taylor-Joy taking over as the teenage and adult Beth, figuring out how to navigate the chess world. The first episode was engrossing enough to make us curious to see where the story is going, and that’s a whole lot more than we can say about 95% of the opening episodes we’ve seen this year.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: Beth, desperate for the green pills, breaks into the room where they are and starts gobbling them down by the handful. Then she grabs the huge glass jar they’re in, just as she’s caught. She drops the massive jar and then passes out.

Sleeper Star:  Moses Ingram does a lot with a little screen time as Jolene. She’s both a good and bad influence on Beth, but the only one at the orphanage that seems to want to buck the system, which brings out the rebel in Beth.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we could see.

Our Call: STREAM IT.  The Queen’s Gambit opens up a world that feels inscrutable at times, told through the eyes of a prodigy who embraces her genius, but is as human as the rest of us.

Should you stream or skip #TheQueensGambit on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) October 23, 2020

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream  The Queen's Gambit On Netflix

• anya taylor-joy
• Stream It Or Skip It

Does 'Yellowstone' Return Tonight? 'Yellowstone's Season 5, Part 2 Premiere Date, Streaming Info, And More

Is The First 'Monday Night Football' Game On Tonight? Where To Stream NFL Games On Monday Nights This Season

Hawk Tuah Girl Tells 'Summer House' Star West Wilson She's Trying To "Step Away" From Her Infamous Nickname

Stream It Or Skip It: 'The Accident' On Netflix, A Thriller Where An Accident At A Kids Birthday Party Throws A Group Of People's Lives Into Chaos

Gary Coleman's Friends "Appalled" By Ex-Wife's 911 Call For His Fatal Fall in 'Gary' Doc: "She Didn't Help Him"

'The Bachelorette' Season 21, Episode 8 Recap: Who Went Home After Fantasy Suites?

‘The Queen’s Gambit’: A Female Bobby Fischer Keeps Her Challengers in Check

• By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

In the great 1993 chess movie Searching for Bobby Fischer , elementary-school-age prodigy Josh finds himself caught between two mentors: Bruce Pandolfini, an aloof master of the game who favors a slow and risk-averse approach to the board, and Vinnie, who hustles tourists in the park and is always encouraging Josh to play as swiftly and boldly as he can.

The real Bruce Pandolfini was one of the technical advisors for The Queen’s Gambit , a new miniseries about a female chess genius coming of age against the backdrop of the Cold War. (He fulfilled a similar role for the 1983 Walter Tevis novel upon which the Netflix show is based.) So it doesn’t feel entirely coincidental that this version of the story operates at a measured pace. You can practically hear Vinnie grumbling about how this TV take is playing not to lose, rather than to win.

Oh, the story seems to start off at breakneck speed, beginning with Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) in a swank Sixties Parisian hotel, popping pills to chase away a bad hangover as she rushes to appear at a press conference about her latest tournament. This, though, is a fakeout: the now-exhausted in media res opening TV writers use when they don’t have confidence that the actual beginnings of their stories are exciting enough. Quickly, we jump away from that glamorous teaser(*) to wade through a whole lot of backstory about young Beth (played at first by Isla Johnston) growing up in a Kentucky orphanage where she and the other girls are heavily medicated.

(*) Almost as frustrating as the use of the in media res device itself is that, by the time we finally return to Paris in a later episode, it’s clear this isn’t a crucial moment in Beth’s story, but simply the one best suited to engage the viewer before the show hit rewind. 

Pandolfini, of course, was only hired to offer advice on the chess matches themselves for the book and the show. Complaints about the pacing are better placed at the feet of Scott Frank, who directed every episode and adapted Tevis’ book with Allan Scott, and who has become one of our preeminent champions of the idea that television should simply be constructed as “movies, but longer.”

Editor’s picks

Every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term, the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, 25 most influential creators of 2024.

Frank actually worked in television early in his career; one of his first credits was a Season One episode of The Wonder Years . Mostly, though, he’s been a terrific writer of genre films like Out of Sight , Minority Report , and Logan . Looking to direct more, he couldn’t get a movie studio to make Godless , his script about the rivalry between two Old West outlaws, set against the backdrop of a frontier town populated entirely by women. So, he sold it to Netflix as a seven-episode miniseries. Godless , released in 2017, has a lot to recommend it. Frank elicits magnetic performances from Jeff Daniels, Merritt Wever, and Michelle Dockery. It’s gorgeously photographed throughout, with several shots jaw-dropping in their composition and staging, and has a rousing action climax. It’s also quite palpably a feature film idea that Frank expanded because he could, and not because the story was best served at that size(*).

(*) Seven hours wound up being almost exactly the wrong length for Godless . The outlaw feud didn’t have enough material to adequately fill that many episodes, while the story of the female-run town still got short shrift. Either contracting or expanding it would have worked better. 

But Godless won several Emmys (including trophies for Daniels and Wever), and inspired Frank to bring The Queen’s Gambit to Netflix after Allan Scott (who has been trying to get a movie made ever since Tevis’ book was published) approached him about directing. And the end result is similar: an aesthetically beautiful project with several superb performances, all in service to a story that starts to feel padded long before the end comes.

There’s a degree to which the orphanage scenes are designed to be slow, the better to illustrate how Beth is withering away there from the narcotics and the cool discipline of administrator Helen Deardorff (Christiane Seidel, one of several Godless alums sprinkled through cast and crew). But the point has been well and truly made long before Beth discovers that custodian Mr. Shaibel (the great character actor Bill Camp) plays chess games against himself in the orphanage’s cramped basement. You don’t need to have seen any other chess films — or, for that matter, any stories about precocious talents with gruff older mentors — to know how this is going to go. But Camp plays Shaibel with such gravity, and such obvious, if reserved, affection for this lonely girl, that Beth’s apprenticeship is fascinating even while the other orphanage scenes are repetitive in the extreme.

Kerry Washington Serves as Commander of All-Black, Female Army Corps in 'Six Triple Eight' Trailer

Lebron james, jimmy butler to feature in netflix's nba docuseries 'starting 5'.

Taylor-Joy soon takes over as Beth, and while she’s not especially convincing as a 15-year-old — much less one whom the orphanage passes off as even younger to attract adoptive mother Alma Wheatley (played by A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood director Marielle Heller) — she proves a spectacular camera subject for Frank and director of photography ​Steven Meizler​. Her face is all oblique angles jutting against a pair of saucer-sized eyes that have to tell a lot of the emotional story, since Beth isn’t much on talking. Between her physical features, the auburn hairstyle crafted by Daniel Parker, and the increasingly stylish mod fashions Gabriele Binder puts her in as Beth’s fortunes rise, Taylor-Joy pops in every scene, even before other characters watch her play and learn what Mr. Shaibel realized about her as a girl: “To tell you the truth of it, child, you’re astounding.”

The early episodes meticulously chronicle Beth learning the game and then establishing herself on the local chess scene. There’s a bit of an underdog flair to these sequences, given how male-dominated the community is, and how no one in her new personal life seems to know or care about chess. Frank and his collaborators (including editor ​Michelle Tesoro) find interesting ways to construct the tournament scenes — one uses the chess board itself to frame simultaneous matches, for instance — but they run out of new ideas before they get to the last big game. And Beth’s utter domination of opponents who treat her as a novelty loses its capacity to surprise well before the competition starts to take her seriously.

Still, Taylor-Joy’s sheer charisma and range go a very long way, as does the obvious fun Frank is having in blending chess drama with Cold War spy iconography. You may not love mod Sixties hotel architecture as much as Frank and production designer Uli Hanisch so obviously do, but you will likely enjoy many of the gliding shots through these joints as Beth rises from local obscurity to international celebrity, all the way to a big showdown with her Soviet rival. (The soundtrack mostly manages to avoid the era’s greatest hits, but can’t resist Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” in a later episode.)

But Frank and Scott ultimately don’t have enough to say about Beth’s struggles with addiction, mental illness, and the isolation of true genius to sustain the story across seven long episodes. Nor do they take advantage of the extended time to better fill out the world around her. Some supporting players, like Thomas Brodie-Sangster as the cocky reigning American champ Benny, make quick impressions, while other characters and relationships feel underfed. There are hints of a romance between Beth and handsome rival player Townes (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), but then he vanishes for a long stretch before being treated as an important part of the story’s endgame. And the script never quite reckons with the contradictory nature of Beth having difficulty socializing even while her friends (particularly Moses Ingram as orphanage roommate Jolene) are unwavering in their devotion to her — as if they wanted their fictional, female version of Bobby Fischer to have a happier life than the real one, but didn’t put in all the work to show how she would get it.

Many of these problems would have been alleviated had Frank made The Queen’s Gambit as a film, or even done three or four episodes rather than seven. As with Godless , a lot of this story’s flaws and superficiality only become obvious because of how long it lingers, while the parts that are excellent (Taylor-Joy’s performance, the technical mastery) wouldn’t be diminished in a more abridged version of the tale.

As Beth teaches her adoptive mother about the game, Alma observes of the tournament audiences, “I’ve noticed the moves they applaud loudest are the ones you play rather quickly.” If only The Queen’s Gambit had kept that in mind.

Netflix releases all seven episodes of The Queen’s Gambit on October 23rd.

The Pogues Have 'Everything to Lose' in 'Outer Banks' Season 4 Teaser

• Bring Home the Gold
• By Larisha Paul

Julia Garner Encounters the Horrors of 'Apartment 7A' Early in 'Rosemary's Baby' Prequel Trailer

'english teacher' is happy to school you on the art of dry comedy, amandla stenberg on ‘the acolyte’ cancellation: ‘not a huge shock’ after ‘vitriol’ from ‘star wars’ fans.

• By Charisma Madarang

Ryan Reynolds Calls on Academy to Add Best Stunts Category

• The Oscar Goes to...

Most Popular

Channing tatum says gambit accent was supposed to be 'unintelligible' at times and he was 'too scared to ask' marvel for the costume to bring home, cheryl hines' enthusiasm for donald trump could not be more curbed, all about rfk jr.'s daughter kick kennedy amid rumors she's dating ben affleck, mariah carey's mother and sister die the same day, singer confirms: "my heart is broken", you might also like, ‘yellowstone’ season 5 part 2 finally gets first look, nearly two years after last episodes, crown princess victoria of sweden makes a splash in ocean print dress for the stockholm junior water prize, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, ‘apocalypse in the tropics’ review: doc on bolsonaro era has strong images but superficial analysis, caitlin clark, fever set attendance record with olympians watching.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

• Entertainment
• Netflix’s Marvelous <em>The Queen’s Gambit</em> Is the Kind of Prestige Drama TV Doesn’t Make Anymore

Netflix’s Marvelous The Queen’s Gambit Is the Kind of Prestige Drama TV Doesn’t Make Anymore

A re TV dramas OK? I ask because, sometime during the past decade, a format once rooted in the daily struggles of more-or-less normal human beings came a bit unglued. So-called prestige drama got darker, stranger, flashier, pulpier, scarier or simply more intense. Forced by a surplus of original content to find a gimmick, many TV creators have turned away from realistic stories, to embrace fantasy, sci-fi, superheroes, melodrama. Maybe the tipping point was Game of Thrones . Maybe it was American Horror Story or The Walking Dead or even Downton Abbey ’s metamorphosis from stodgy period piece to self-aware soap. Now, pay TV platforms such as HBO and Amazon are loading up on genre fare—some but not all of it great. Emotional dramas like Six Feet Under and Friday Night Lights have given way to the mawkish This Is Us . Procedurals are getting weird; The Good Wife team begat Evil . And the most authentic, vividly wrought characters of the last several years have mostly come from half-hour dramedies: Fleabag , Atlanta , Enlightened , BoJack Horseman , Better Things , Insecure , Catastrophe , Vida .

At this point, any hour-long drama that forsakes intellectual property, narrative histrionics and expensive special effects in favor of psychological realism represents a welcome change of pace. And one as excellent as The Queen’s Gambit feels very rare indeed. An adaptation of the novel by Walter Tevis ( The Hustler , The Man Who Fell to Earth ) that comes to Netflix on Oct. 23, the absorbing seven-part miniseries is first and foremost a character study. Its hero, orphaned chess prodigy Beth Harmon, may not be the typical mid-20th-century girl. But hers is essentially a coming-of-age story—one that asks what awaits a brilliant, precocious loner in adulthood. The show’s suspense comes less from the question of whether she’ll grow up to become the world champion than from the question of whether she’ll grow up to be reasonably stable and happy.

Played as a child by Isla Johnston and later, in a transcendent performance, by Anya Taylor-Joy, Beth arrives at a Kentucky orphanage after surviving a car crash that kills her mother. It’s the late 1950s, and instead of getting the opportunity to talk through the precariousness of growing up without a family, wards of the state have their trauma managed by two-toned green tranquilizer capsules. Jolene (sharp newcomer Moses Ingram), a kind, resilient older girl who has been repeatedly passed over for adoption—probably because she’s Black—becomes a surrogate big sister to the taciturn, self-possessed Beth. Her advice: save those fun green pills for bedtime.

Sent to clap out erasers in the basement by a math teacher with nothing left to teach her, Beth meets the closest person she’ll ever have to a father figure: Mr. Shaibel (the wonderful Bill Camp), a grumpy janitor who spends idle moments gaming out chess moves. She’s obsessed with the game before she even knows what it’s called. High on meds she’s taken to hoarding, she envisions chessboards on the shadowy ceiling of her dormitory and loses hours playing through imaginary matches. It doesn’t take long for her to start beating Shaibel, then the head of his chess club and the star of the local high school team. By the time a couple in suburban Lexington adopts her, after four or five years at the orphanage, Beth knows chess is her destiny.

But she’s painfully out of place in her new home—a worst-case-scenario implementation of the Dorothy Draper aesthetic, all heavy curtains and plush carpeting and floral wallpaper in shades of fuchsia and turquoise. Like the doll she receives as a gift while at the orphanage and deposits directly into the trash, her pink bedroom assumes an affinity for the trappings of traditional femininity that she never developed. At school, teenybopper girls in identical sweaters and circle skirts make fun of her stiff pinafores and short, blunt, institutional bob. (The Anna Wintour look doesn’t quite work on a teenager.) But with her adoptive father always away, supposedly on business, and her new mom (played with astonishing sensitivity by Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller) perennially beer-drunk at home, 15-year-old Beth finds her way back to chess.

By episode three, the sports arc has kicked in, as Beth rises from local curiosity—a teen girl who handily defeats men more than twice her age—to international star. Though they eventually started to feel a bit repetitive to this novice, the chess matches are mostly exciting and, as far as I could tell, realistic. (Russian chess eminence Garry Kasparov consulted on the show.) German production designer Uli Hanisch, of Babylon Berlin , imports that series’ glamour and scrupulous historical detail to create immersive renderings of Paris, Moscow and Mexico City in the ’60s. In his Pop Art Las Vegas, a stack of huge, glittery dice are the centerpiece of the glassy hotel lobby, with smaller versions carved into the wooden room dividers.

Yet it’s Beth and her relationships that remain the focal point. A lesser adaptation might reduce her to an antihero of Don Draper or Olivia Pope proportions—a genius at work but selfish, manipulative, destructive and sometimes plain nasty in her personal life. Instead, writer-director Scott Frank ( Godless ) uses Beth’s interactions to draw out this strange girl’s unacknowledged longing to connect. In Heller’s Alma, a pianist who chose marriage over career, she finds an unlikely kindred spirit: a woman who seeks excitement, and who too often finds it at the bottom of a cocktail glass or a pill bottle. Their partnership could easily be depicted as mutually exploitative, with the underaged Beth taking advantage of Alma’s restlessness to keep entering tournaments and Alma using Beth for prize money and an excuse to leave her ugly living room. Though it starts out that way, what develops later is a surprisingly tender familial bond.

Meanwhile, chess brings men into Beth’s life. Hotshot players Beltik (Harry Melling, a Harry Potter alum most recently seen in The Old Guard ) and then Benny (Thomas Brodie-Sangster of Godless and the Maze Runner movies), a pipsqueak whose bohemian leatherwear reads as a doth-protest-too-much rejection of the chess nerd stereotype, fall under a spell she’s unaware of casting. Just as you feel a familiar dynamic forming, in which a talented woman ends up intimidating her suitors, The Queen’s Gambit swerves; it’s probably no coincidence that a story about chess thrives on confounding audience expectations. For her part, Beth carries a torch for a man (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) she trounces in her first-ever tournament.

For actors as well as writers, it’s hard to portray a character like Beth without falling prey to what is sometimes called the “not like other girls” trope —in this case, the implication that it’s her divergence from gender norms that make this blunt, confident, poker-faced young woman extraordinary. Frank avoids this trap by giving her a love of fashion (costume designer Gabriele Binder uses exquisite period costumes to capture an increasingly sophisticated character whose self-image never stops evolving) and by centering her heartfelt friendships with other women.

Taylor-Joy is the final, most crucial piece in the Beth Harmon puzzle. A 24-year-old who broke out in 2015’s terrifying The Witch when she was still in her teens, the actor has since genre-hopped from horror to black comedy ( Thoroughbreds ) to Jane Austen (the most recent Emma adaptation) in a series of stunning performances. It isn’t so much an alternate take on the ingénue that she brings to each of these roles, although she has a rare, arresting beauty. What radiates from her unfeasibly large, ultra-alert eyes is an intensity that verges on otherworldly. If she’s not like other girls, it’s because she might be the remarkably expressive prototype for a new and improved model of human. That, more than anything, is Beth. “Her deep passion for chess is the passion that I have for my art,” Taylor-Joy has said . “It felt easy to transfer the emotion.” Watching one of the year’s most fascinating TV characters ascend to the mid-century chess firmament, you believe her.

More Must-Reads from TIME

• Breaking Down the 2024 Election Calendar
• How Nayib Bukele’s ‘Iron Fist’ Has Transformed El Salvador
• What if Ultra-Processed Foods Aren’t as Bad as You Think?
• How Ukraine Beat Russia in the Battle of the Black Sea
• Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
• How Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Americans’ Health
• What a $129 Frying Pan Says About America’s Eating Habits
• The 32 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024

Contact us at [email protected]

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Queen’s Gambit Defies Every Frustrating ‘Strong Woman’ Trope

I don’t think I’ve ever sat through a full game of chess, but I breezed through the entirety of The Queen’s Gambit with the rapture of someone who understands the move from which Netflix’s new miniseries gets its name. (I still don’t, sorry.)

Set in the late 1950s to early ’60s, The Queen’s Gambit spans the adolescent life of Beth Harmon ( Anya Taylor-Joy ), an orphan with no prospects, a haunted past, and only one thing going for her: a remarkable ability. Taught chess by a janitor in the same orphanage that kicked off her rampant addiction to tranquilizers, Beth uses the only gift she’s ever had to make a better life for herself. She enters tournament after tournament, enamoring and befuddling the chess community—almost completely made up of men—as she fights her way to the top. You know how this type of story goes.

Except, maybe you don’t. While the chess matches themselves were exhilarating to witness—yes, they really were—it was the relationships Beth forms throughout the series that truly gave this stunning period piece unexpected soul. In particular, the tender relationship between Beth and her adoptive mother, Mrs. Alma Wheatley (Marielle Heller), was increasingly heartening—and heartbreaking—to watch develop over the course of seven episodes.

This is just one of the ways creators Scott Frank and Allan Scott—who adapted the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis for TV—succeeded in telling Beth’s story without reducing her to a one-dimensional “strong woman” or defining the female experience based on the actions of men, a feat that is...unusual…when cultivated by a team of them.

The most refreshing thing about Beth’s triumphs and tribulations was that they were her own. I found myself continually, and thankfully unnecessarily, bracing for Beth’s childhood trauma to be compounded by her adoptive father and each surprisingly sexy chess player she found herself alone with. The relief I felt when Beth remained unscathed and befriended as opposed to used and hurt was palpable. When I tell this to Taylor-Joy, she immediately understood.

“It’s possibly true for most people that you can be your own worst enemy,” Taylor-Joy said over the phone from Belfast, where she's shooting The Northman (Taylor-Joy was most recently tapped to fill Charlize Theron's shoes as Furiosa in the next Mad Max spin-off). “Beth is battling her demons so hard that even if everything else outside of that feels okay, she can be in a really rough place. I definitely connected with that.”

In fact, Beth is not only allowed to embrace and enjoy sex throughout the series; she’s given the freedom to experiment and, frankly, be awkward. “I love Beth’s sexual journey. I think it’s so honest and kind of funny and interesting,” Taylor-Joy continues. “Some of the moments in the show when I feel the most, like, ‘Oh Beth, you’ve behaved badly,’ is how callously she treats some of the men in her life. I’m like, ‘Beth, you need to learn a bit of empathy—that was straight up not cool.’”

Of course, that doesn’t mean Taylor-Joy’s input wasn’t necessary to help shape Beth as a woman. “[Frank] at one point was worried that she was getting too glamorous,” the actor explains. “I was like, ‘It’s in the show that she loves clothes. She can also be a chess champion. They are not mutually exclusive.’” (Oh yeah, did I mention that the costumes and sets could rival those of Mad Men ?)

“He was like, ‘Sorry, of course!’ and totally down to go with it,” Taylor-Joy continues. “I’ve never been very good at keeping my opinions to myself when it comes to my work, and I’m lucky that people seem to want them.” She’s like Beth in that way. “Beth is very confident in chess and not that confident in real life, and I definitely feel that in my work. Where I feel most confident in my opinions and what I have to contribute is definitely on set, and then the rest of my life I can get a bit more wavy—but on set I’m like, ‘No, no, no. I know what I’m doing.’”

That much was absolutely clear. 

The Queen's Gambit is available now on Netflix .  

Emily Tannenbaum is an entertainment journalist, critic, and screenwriter living in L.A . Follow her on Twitter.  

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes

The Queen's Gambit plays familiar moves with style and star power: Review

Anya Taylor-Joy is stunning as a self-destructive chess prodigy in Netflix's solidly entertaining miniseries.

I like chess, I like '60s fashion, and I like Anya Taylor-Joy . So I was a cheap date for The Queen's Gambit , Netflix's new seven-part miniseries streaming Friday. Taylor-Joy plays Beth Harmon, an outcast teen chess prodigy who becomes a grown-up celebrity chess casualty. Writer-director Scott Frank tracks her from a dingy orphanage cellar to globetrotting duels against Soviet supermen. It's a stylish period piece with the rambling-years momentum of a John Irving novel. Luscious production design and a darkly fascinating lead performance duel against mawkish sentiment and a messy final act. It's always fun to watch, even when it's playing emotional checkers.

The series begins with Beth hungover and half-sunk into a bathtub. She's in a palatial Paris hotel room; the place looks trashed. She gets dressed, notices someone in her bed, pops some pills, and races downstairs. Flashbulbs pop in her face. The whole world press is there, watching her play the Russian grandmaster Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski). They make a sharp contrast. He's a stern middle-aged communist, somehow looming and invisible, followed everywhere by his KGB retinue of bodyguard-jailers. She's glamorous, undone, afire, and lonely. It's a great opening, rife with conflict: America, Russia, woman, man, youth, experience, druggy hedonism, rigid professionalism.

Alas, it is a prologue flash-forward, the hottest story idea of 2006. Queen's Gambit kind of earns its backstep. The first episode circles to a younger Beth (Isla Johnston), shellshocked after her mother dies in a maybe suicidal car crash. She arrives at a midcentury Catholic orphanage. Those three words suggest nightmare possibilities, but here the abuse is all chemical. Orderlies stuff the kids full of state-mandated tranquilizers. Beth is getting high on Orphan's Little Helper right as she discovers chess. Downstairs, somber janitor Mr. Shaibel ( Bill Camp ) plays solo matches on his ratty board. He starts teaching Beth the basics, and realizes he's found a queen.

Every episode takes another step forward in Beth's chess career, her coming of age, and her addiction spiral. It's a familiar biopic trajectory, though the source material is a novel by Walter Tevis. Taylor-Joy is at her best playing Beth as a kid with a Vulcan-ish awkward confidence. She lets you see how the chessboard is an escape for a confused young person and a kind of religion, offering "an entire world of just 64 squares" to someone whose inner life is full of murky confusion.

Beth winds up adopted by the Wheatleys, a married couple whose heavily patterned house looks like the mausoleum of '50s America. Dad Allston (Patrick Kennedy) is distantly busy. His wife, Alma ( Marielle Heller ), grieves a never-quite-explained loss by retreating into daylight drinking and perpetual television. When she realizes her adopted daughter has a lucrative chess habit, she sparks to life. Heller's performance is astounding, a world-weary match for Taylor-Joy's anxious curiosity. Alma becomes a supportive manager, yet there's something overly vicarious in her interest. She's being a good mother — and turning a teenager into her drinking buddy.

Everyone knows how to play chess, right? We've all seen The Wire ? Frank has a lot of director-y fun staging Beth's duels. There are split-screens, fourth-wall staring contests, time-lapse montages of pieces moving. Taylor-Joy's hands move so fast, I kept rewinding to figure out if the video was sped up. (I think it's just gusto.) I enjoyed the wonkish specificity of Beth's strategic evolution from blitzkrieg attack to patient lateral defense. You sense that Frank is unsure just how much strategy the audience will take, and he makes some dramatic sports-movie leaps. The important games are always a spiritual dual, elaborate flirtation, and/or a private reckoning with flashback sorrow.

What works better is how the miniseries brings the whole chess subculture to life. It's an environment of cerebral swagger, diffident competitiveness, and geek love. Beth starts off playing smartly dressed young weirdoes in cafeterias, where everyone whispers longingly about a Kentucky champion named Harry Beltik (Harry Melling). Rising the ranks, she meets national contender Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a beatnik cowboy who carries an ornamental knife. Brodie-Sangster has a lot of fun as the coolest kid in nerd club, brandishing his very own Sports Illustrated cover story and yearning for the USSR's enlightened chess culture. There are lushly art-directed arenas in Las Vegas and Mexico City, and Beth's interactions with her fellow players to take a few diagonal soap opera turns.

In Split and The Witch , Taylor-Joy's wide eyes exuded a paranoid gothic quality; she looked like what would happen if Emma Stone saw dead people. Her recent work has edged into droll comedy. All that and more comes into play here. Beth's an intellectual superhuman and an internal wreck, struggling with memories of her brilliant yet unsettled biological mother even as she nonchalantly dispatches egomaniacs. Queen's Gambit occasionally tries to expand into a larger tale of femininity, so many woman carrying hidden bags of clinking liquor bottles. The storytelling can turn a bit prosaic, though, and there's a point where all the dialogue is some kind of we-get-it warning about the dangers of obsessive greatness. Taylor-Joy adeptly plays high-functioning addiction, and I wish, I wish, I wish that her drug trips didn't involve giant chess pieces hanging down from the ceiling. Bad, digital effects, bad!

Frank's screenplays extend back a generation, from splendid '90s crime ( Get Shorty , Out of Sight ) through essential blockbusters ( Minority Report , Logan ). Netflix snared him for 2017's Emmy-winning Godless , and now the streaming service is basically employing him as a miniseries auteurist-in-residence. I heartily recommend this show, even if the last couple hours feature overt clichés and ever-blander dialogue. Queen's Gambit will be remembered as the final star-making moment for Taylor-Joy, before her movie career rockets fast and Furiosa -ly . The story is literally about an ingenue rising to global fame. But Taylor-Joy excels in the quiet moments, her eyelids narrowing as she decimates an opponent, her whole body physicalizing angry desperation when the game turns against her. The king might be in trouble. Fortunately, the queen has all the best moves. B

Related content:

• Please put pandemic-themed shows on lockdown
• Rich people suffer beautifully in The Undoing , HBO's latest thriller
• Fargo season 4 has a lot of nothing to say about America

Related Articles

Movies | ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ review: Irresistible…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Music and Concerts
• The Theater Loop
• TV and Streaming

Things To Do

Movies | ‘the queen’s gambit’ review: irresistible coming-of-age drama. no prior chess expertise required..

Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the show has been streaming for a week now, and it’s the sort of sleek, classy escapism that makes the recently announced Netflix price hike seem like no big pandemic deal. No less so than “Enola Holmes”or the dreaded “Holidate,” to name two other Netflix diversions, this one offers a wealth of angles and entry points for a broad audience, teenaged girls among them. “The Queen’s Gambit” may be rated TV-MA but, aside from some occasional rough language amid a lot of drug use, the story operates as a sleek, wish-fulfillment fairy tale. I recommended it to the 15-year-old in our house; we’ll see what she says about it.

The tensions start on the chess board and ripple out from there. They’re driven by a compelling tough nut of a heroine, risking addiction as well as her sanity in her meteoric rise in international chess circles. Like “Whiplash,” or a calmer version of “Black Swan,””The Queen’s Gambit” leans into its protagonist’s magnificent, punishing obsession.

“People like you, you’re two sides of the same coin,” as her mentor, played by the marvelous Bill Camp, tells young Beth, played by Isla Johnston as a preteen and the series star, Anya Taylor-Joy, as a teenager and young adult. “You’ve got your gift. And you’ve got what it costs.”

Young Beth sheds one life (with a troubled, suicidal mother) for another, at the orphanage where she meets, among others, her one true friend Jolene (Moses Ingram). A few years later, Beth’s adopted by a nearby Lexington, Ky. couple on the marital skids. Marielle Heller, the actress now best known as an often inspired director (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”), emerges as a key supporting player as Beth’s adoptive mother. They come to know and understand each other, gradually. They’re fellow artists under the skin. Also, both understand the seduction of pills and liquor all too well. (Heller’s character refers to her little green and white pills as “my tranquility medicine.”)

Flashbacks of her earlier years haunt Beth throughout. At the orphanage, she learns chess from the stoic janitor portrayed unerringly by Camp. It’s her lifeline or her curse, depending. “The Queen’s Gambit” charts her progress, her blinkered devotion to the game, and an eccentric, beautifully cast array of friends, occasional lovers and once and future chess adversaries, as Beth moves from regional triumphs to national to Mexico City, Paris and Cold War-era Moscow.

Taylor-Joy is terrific. She has been for years now, certainly since the 2015 wonder “The Witch.” She makes Beth, who rarely misses anything, a sphinx whose secrets we’re let in on from the start yet remain fruitfully mysterious and subtly suggested. The character, as concieved in the novel, doesn’t really extend beyond two dimensions (she’s either reckless train wreck, or tightly coiled, laser-focused opponent) into a third. But the scenes and eventual travels with her mother are delightful, and as Beth’s chess world friends and confidantes roll back into her life, years later, “The Queen’s Gambit” creates a satisfying circularity.

A few nits. Nobody, and I mean nobody, talks like they’re from Kentucky. The cinematography undercuts the first-rate production and costume design with a penchant for heavy-handed, copper-colored period tones. The final episode delivers in spades, though a mite shamelessly. Small matters. The fun throughout, the payoff, is in seeing Beth yank the rug out from one misunderestimating lunkhead and authority figure after another.

Frank’s earlier screenwriting credits include such pleasing, off-center winners as “Out of Sight,” “Get Shorty” and “Minority Report.” Faced with a steady stream of chess matches to dramatize, he accomplishes more modestly what Martin Scorsese did so grandly in “Raging Bull”: He gives each square-off a different visual personality and approach. Through it all, Taylor-Joy’s singular, wide-set gaze betrays flickers of confidence, panic, assurance, doubt, depending on the moment.

The results aren’t “important,” or “improving.” They’re just pretty irresistible.

Three and a half stars (out of four)

Rating: TV-MA

Running time: 7 episodes, apprxomately 6 hrs., 30 minutes

Screening: Now on Netflix.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Twitter @phillipstribune

More in Movies

Movies | ‘Mountains’ review: In Miami’s Little Haiti, a family wonders if gentrification is the American dream

Movies | 10 movies for fall 2024: Our film picks and questions about everything from ‘Wicked I’ to ‘Joker II’

Movies | ‘Deadpool’ and ‘Alien’ top weekend box office charts again as ‘Blink Twice’ sees quiet opening

Movies | ‘Good One’ review: A father-daughter hiking trip leads to a heart-rending feature debut

Trending nationally.

• Tiny copper earring found buried on Outer Banks is new clue in search for Algonquian village
• Hiker left behind on mountain by coworkers during office retreat, stranded overnight amid freezing rain, high winds
• Country music star stops Colorado concert after alleged assault in the crowd
• Volleyball coach steps down after controversial comments about Gus Walz
• One of Colorado’s reintroduced wolves wandered into Rocky Mountain National Park — its first wolf presence recorded

Den of Geek

The Queen’s Gambit Review: A (Grand)masterful Portrait of Genius and Addiction

Netflix’s period piece miniseries tracks a chess prodigy’s highs and lows through striking visuals and sensitive storytelling.

• Share on Facebook (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Twitter (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Linkedin (opens in a new tab)
• Share on email (opens in a new tab)

This The Queen’s Gambit review contains no spoilers.

Did you know that a chess game can run so long that it gets adjourned? The player whose turn it is records their next move in a sealed envelope so that when both opponents next sit down, refreshed, they can proceed as if play has been unbroken. That is just one of the intricacies of chess revealed to the layman viewer in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit , starring Anya Taylor-Joy as fictional chess prodigy Beth Harmon. Adapted from Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel, the miniseries—whose seven episodes are named for phases or moves of a chess game—itself resembles this form of match: Drawn-out in parts, but worth the necessary breaks, building to a complete and powerful experience by the end.

Spanning a decade (taking place in the 1950s and ‘60s) and ranging from Kentucky to Moscow, Scott Frank’s series is equal parts sports narrative, period piece, and character study of the gray area between genius and psychosis. Taylor-Joy is magnetic as the brilliant and aloof Beth, a savant who craves the control of a chess board while grappling with the addiction that allows her to tap into that preternatural headspace that makes her a champion and potentially a grandmaster. Orphaned at a young age by a mother whose own mathematical brilliance is overshadowed by untreated mental illness and self-destructive tendencies, Beth learns self-reliance through her ability to scan through the algorithmic possibilities of a chess board. But because her entire sense of self is wrapped up in the identity of chess prodigy, and because she relies on tranquilizer pills (first handed out at the orphanage) to unlock that level of play, her need to win is much more desperate than that of her opponents.

Despite Beth’s insistence on stoic loneliness, The Queen’s Gambit boasts a stellar cast of supporting characters. Bill Camp is a standout as the orphanage’s gruff janitor Mr. Shaibel, who first nurtures young Beth’s fledgling talent. Among Beth’s professional opponents are former child stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster ( Game of Thrones ) as the cowboy-shtick Benny, and Harry Melling ( Harry Potter ) as the more sensitive Harry Beltik. Like an exquisitely carved set of chess pieces, each character augments Beth’s personal and professional paths. As fellow orphan Jolene, Moses Ingram commands each scene, though one might wish that her appearances weren’t so conveniently timed to breaking points in Beth’s life (yet the series also lampshades that). Then there’s Marielle Heller, perhaps best known as director of recent films like Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood , who brings that same affecting ache to her portrayal of Beth’s adoptive mother Alma Wheatley: A ‘60s housewife whose own creative impulses are stifled by her homemaker duties, she represents the kind of future Beth staunchly wishes to avoid.

Ad – content continues below

Though Beth herself becomes something of a role model for her female peers, she is utterly frustrated with the gender dimension of her narrative in a way that feels entirely authentic. For her time, she is considered exceptional because she’s a girl trouncing all the men at chess; yet she would rather be exceptional, period. Add to that her growing addiction to the pills, while taking after both of her mothers via alcoholism, and it only fuels her impostor syndrome—a term that hadn’t even been invented when this story takes place—and guilt at wasting this incredible, life-changing opportunity.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Beth’s career trajectory is witnessing how she steadily outpaces her male opponents. As Beth rises in the rankings, some of the previously mocking or dismissive men begin dropping off the tournament circuit, opting to examine the game from another, non-player perspective or to leave it behind altogether. These encounters both strengthen Beth’s conviction in her talent and challenge her to reconsider how healthy her single-minded obsession is.

Some of these former opponents also return as love interests, another notable aspect of Beth being the sole girl in the boys’ club. The miniseries handles this type of occupational hazard with sensitivity and respect, managing to depict Beth’s fumbling explorations of her sexuality without ever demeaning her character.

It helps that sometimes a chess match is foreplay, playful and existing only between the two participants. Other times, it’s an anxiety attack, mentally moving pieces back and forth while scrambling to predict what the other person will do. Just as it demystifies the structure of a chess match, The Queen’s Gambit also takes great care in dramatizing, in incredibly engaging fashion, the gameplay itself. The casual viewer won’t necessarily be able to follow every lightning-fast move, but the flow and the narrative of every game is clear. The cinematography is superb, especially the recurring visual motif of Beth manifesting a chess board out of shadows on her bedroom ceiling, the ghostly pieces blinking in and out of reality as she trains herself to anticipate moves.

It’s a rare series that can accurately render a particular form of genius without alienating the viewers who will always be the spectators. Beth’s struggles with addiction, and with the systems into which she was cosmically placed as some sort of powerless pawn, ground her brilliance without punishing her for it. Hers is a messy, poignant underdog story with the important takeaway that even if one becomes the queen, there’s no use in standing alone on an empty board; you’re nothing without the rest of the set.

The Queen’s Gambit premieres October 23 on Netflix.

Natalie Zutter | @nataliezutter

Natalie Zutter is a playwright, audio dramatist, and pop culture writer living in Brooklyn. She writes what she loves reading/seeing: space opera, feminist epic fantasy, time…

'The Queen's Gambit': This Netflix miniseries about chess is one of the best shows of 2020

Even in a year as bleak as 2020 , the right TV show can come along and happily surprise you. 

Smart, enthralling and a little sexy, "The Queen's Gambit" has jumped to the No. 1 spot on Netflix in the U.S. for good reason – it's just that good. Even if it's about chess. 

Based on the novel by Walter Tevis, "Queen's" (streaming now, ★★★½ out of four) follows the rise of fictional chess prodigy Beth Harmon (a stunning Anya Taylor-Joy ), a Kentucky orphan in the 1960s who learns the game from a janitor (Bill Camp) in her orphanage's basement. As a teen, she makes her way onto the international chess circuit, traveling the globe and handily beating men twice her age. She also spends that time battling addiction, a much harder fight for Beth than any chess match. 

Thanks to Taylor-Joy's performance, a strong supporting cast and the right balance of trials and triumph, "Queen's" is a surprisingly gripping adventure (yes, a chess adventure) that still manages to find levity and happiness. It's a show that seems tailor-made for our joy-starved minds in a somber modern world. It might make even the most skeptical among us take dust-covered chess sets out of the basement

More: Everything coming to Netflix in October: From more 'Schitt's Creek' to plenty of horror

The series begins with Beth as a quiet 9-year-old who has just been orphaned by a car crash and is delivered to a depressing orphanage that hands out tranquilizers like candy to keep the kids docile. She quickly discovers that stockpiling them, and taking multiple doses a few nights a week, leads to exciting highs. One day, she walks in on the janitor playing chess against himself in the basement, and is drawn to the game. He teaches her the rules and is awed by her natural talent. She spends her nights popping pills and imagining chess games on the ceiling of her dormitory, one of many arresting visuals in "Queen's" over the course of its seven episodes. 

As a teenager, Beth is adopted by the Wheatleys, an unhappy married couple. While the husband spends weeks on "business trips" out West, Beth gradually bonds with her new mother, Alma (Marielle Heller), a functional alcoholic. Beth wins local chess tournaments, and after Alma discovers how much money her new daughter can make, she acts as Beth's agent and manager, pulling her out of school so they can travel to national and international tournaments. 

More: 50 best TV shows to watch on Netflix right now: 'Evil,' 'Schitt's Creek' finale

As she rises through the ranks of professional chess, Beth becomes entwined with her almost exclusively male opponents. There's Harry Beltik (Harry Melling, best known as Dudley in the "Harry Potter" movies), who becomes obsessed with Beth after she beats him for the Kentucky state title at age 15; D.L. Townes (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), a dashing older player who immediately catches Beth's eye; and Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), an American champion who initially dismisses Beth's talent before eventually helping to train her to take on the world's best chess players, the Soviets. 

Written and directed by Scott Frank, an Oscar nominee for his "Logan" script, "Queen's" is electrifying. Frank's direction is full of quick cuts, artful framing and beautiful shots. Paired with the superb score, "Queen's" gives the series' many chess matches near Olympic tension and gravitas, as exciting as any great sports film. 

But "Queen's" wouldn't sing without Taylor-Joy, who turns in one of the best performances of her already celebrated young career. Her expressive face and even more expressive hand movements are a key part of what makes the chess matches so mesmerizing. She fits so perfectly into the 1960s fashions and mannerisms that she may well have been born in the wrong decade. 

The supporting cast is also terrific, especially Heller as Alma, who acts as both an enabler and support system for her surprisingly smart adopted daughter. Known mostly for her work as a director ("A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Heller makes Alma so much more than just another disillusioned housewife. Newcomer Moses Ingram, who plays Jolene, Beth's best friend from the orphanage, also stands out brightly in a limited amount of screen time. 

There have been many films and TV shows about geniuses and the burden and costs of a great mind, but few with a woman's story at the center. Beth is as messy, mean and ultimately brilliant as the likes of John Nash (Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind") or Will Hunting (Matt Damon in "Good Will Hunting"). 

Beth Harmon could probably beat them both at chess. 

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The Queen's Gambit

• TV Mini Series

Orphaned at the tender age of nine, prodigious introvert Beth Harmon discovers and masters the game of chess in 1960s USA. But child stardom comes at a price. Orphaned at the tender age of nine, prodigious introvert Beth Harmon discovers and masters the game of chess in 1960s USA. But child stardom comes at a price. Orphaned at the tender age of nine, prodigious introvert Beth Harmon discovers and masters the game of chess in 1960s USA. But child stardom comes at a price.

• Scott Frank
• Allan Scott
• Anya Taylor-Joy
• Chloe Pirrie
• 2.6K User reviews
• 139 Critic reviews
• 58 wins & 53 nominations total

Top cast 99+

• Beth Harmon

• Alice Harmon

• Mr. Shaibel

• Vasily Borgov

• Alma Wheatley

• Benny Watts

• Harry Beltik

• Young Beth Harmon

• Borgov's Wife

• Allston Wheatley

• Helen Deardorff

• D.L. Townes

• Mr. Fergusson

• Five-Year-Old Beth

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia It took writer and producer Allan Scott about thirty years to get this show into production. During that time, he rewrote the story nine times and approached several studios. Each studio rejected the show, as they believed that nobody would be interested in chess. Ironically, this show became the most viewed show on Netflix, attracting over 62 million viewers worldwide within a month after its debut.
• Goofs Beth is sent to Bradley's by Alma with a note to get 3 packs of Chesterfields. The clerk hands her just one pack, which is seen again when she looks at the chess magazine and again when she walks out of Bradley's. Yet when she arrives home, she places 3 packs down on the kitchen counter.

Harry Beltik : Anger's a potent spice. A pinch wakes you up. Too much dulls your senses.

• Connections Featured in Jeremy Vine: Episode #3.227 (2020)

User reviews 2.6K

• Mar 28, 2022
• How many seasons does The Queen's Gambit have? Powered by Alexa
• What is the film going on, episode 3, hotel room sharing beer? (dialogue defines "gimmick".
• Have any chess experts examined the chess moves for authenticity?
• Why didn't Beth's last name change when she was adopted?
• October 23, 2020 (United States)
• United States
• diziler filmler
• Official Netflix
• Berlin, Germany
• Wonderful Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• IMDb Answers: Help fill gaps in our data
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed.

• Entertainment

The Queen's Gambit: That ending explained and all your questions answered

Is the Netflix show based on a true story? Let's go through all those key details and more.

• Best New Journalist 2019 Australian IT Journalism Awards

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen's Gambit.

If you're still buzzing from Beth Harmon's triumph in The Queen's Gambit on Netflix, let's dive even further into the excellent miniseries. We'll hopefully have all your questions covered, from whether the show's based on a true story of a chess prodigy to what a "Queen's Gambit" is exactly. 

Read more : The Queen's Gambit could be a game changer for women's chess

Warning: Spoilers ahead

Young Beth learns chess from Mr. Shaibel, her orphanage's janitor.

Is it based on a true story?

While The Queen's Gambit comes across as an inspirational sports story, it's an adaptation of a 1983 fictional coming-of-age novel of the same name written by American novelist Walter Tevis. Tevis was a chess player himself and consulted real-life chess masters to ensure he accurately depicted the intricacies and rules of professional chess. So no, Elizabeth Harmon isn't based on a real orphaned chess prodigy from the '50s and '60s. But if you're looking for a female chess player to read up on, Judit Polgar of Hungary is generally considered the strongest female chess player ever.

What's the Queen's Gambit?

In chess, a gambit is an opening move in which the player will sacrifice pieces to later gain a positive position. According to The Chess Website , "The Queen's Gambit is probably the most popular gambit and although most gambits are said to be unsound against perfect play the Queen's Gambit is said to be the exception." It's the move Beth uses in her final winning match against Vasily Borgov, the Russian world champion. "The objective of the queen's gambit is to temporarily sacrifice a pawn to gain control of the center of the board."

How does Beth's real mother die?

When Beth was 9, her real mother Alice committed suicide by driving into an oncoming vehicle. She first drives to Beth's father's house, where his new wife answers with their young son. Alice asks Paul for help with taking care of Beth, but Paul frantically rushes her away from his new family. He says she can come back another time and they'll talk, but it's been five years since they last saw each other and he's clearly moved on. With nowhere to take Beth, Alice attempts to kill them both in the crash. Beth miraculously survives, but suffers from emotional issues throughout her life.

Beth and Benny Watts.

What pill does Beth take?

At Beth's orphanage, the Methuen Home for Girls, the children are given tranquillizer pills to make them compliant. When a law is passed forbidding this and Beth's pills are taken away, she suffers withdrawals and continues to struggle with her addiction to the drug.

How does Mrs. Wheatley die?

After her whirlwind romance with pen pal Manuel in Mexico City ends, Mrs. Wheatley doesn't show up to Beth's match with Borgov. Beth returns to her hotel room to discover Mrs. Wheatley dead. The coroner expects it was hepatitis, an inflammatory condition of the liver. Mrs. Wheatley was an alcoholic, running up a huge bill on margaritas at the hotel.

How does Beth beat Benny Watts?

The first time Beth plays Benny Watts, the reigning US champion, at the US Open in Las Vegas, he defeats her. Later, with the help of ex-Kentucky state champion Harry Beltik, Beth learns to study her opponents and the big games in their careers, instead of just relying on her intuition and improvising in the moment. She buys a copy of Chess Review with a feature on Watts and asks him questions about himself in person, like why he carries around a knife (he says it's protection from "whatever"). In the final match of the US Championship in Ohio, Beth swiftly defeats him in 30 moves. She allows him to play the same move he played to defeat her the first time -- trading queens -- but this time she's prepared.

Beth and Borgov.

How does adjournment work?

When Beth plays her final match against Borgov in Russia, he requests they adjourn until the next day. This means he must write his next move on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. The director will then kick off the next session with the prepared move. This ensures neither player knows what the board will look like when it's their next turn.

Why does Borgov want to adjourn?

In the final match between Beth and Borgov at the Moscow Invitational, Beth appears to be the more tired of the two, after playing several long matches in a row. But it's Borgov who requests they end the session and pick up the following day. This decision could point to Borgov's interview in a tape Beth watches while training with Harry, where Borgov talks about coming up against people half his age, like Beth, and doesn't know how long he can continue winning. "I can fight against anyone but time." It's possible he too is tired and calls the adjournment, something a player could do after the first 40 moves have been played. Before the arrival of chess-playing computer programs that can be used to analyze adjourned positions, games that didn't finish within 5 hours were adjourned automatically. Borgov, possibly already feeling threatened he'll lose, probably retreats to consult the other Russian players -- Beth stumbled upon Borgov helping previous world champion Luchenko in the adjournment of their match a day or two before.

Do the actors actually play chess?

The highly detailed  chess sequences were put together by chess coach Bruce Pandolfini (who consulted on the original novel), with advice from Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov. They likely used chess engines, computer programs that analyze chess positions and generate a list of strongest moves, as well as faithfully matching scenarios in the book and drawing from real games. For example, Beth and Borgov's final match, up until a point, is based on a game between Ukrainian Vasyl Ivanchuk and American Patrick Wolff at the Biel Interzonal chess tournament in Switzerland in 1993, according to chess YouTube channel agadmator . While that game ended in a draw, Beth ends up finding a different move that leads to her win. Borgov's standing to applaud Beth after she wins is a reference to a famous match between defending champion Russian Boris Spassky and American opponent Bobby Fischer at the 1972 World Championship in Iceland, depicted in the 2014 film Pawn Sacrifice. When Fischer wins, Spassky joins in with the audience's applause.

What's the response from the chess community?

The Queen's Gambit has been generally praised by critics. Though it's received good reviews from chess players, a criticism has been aimed at the exclusive use of men's games as the basis for its fictional contests. "The Queen's Gambit is so brilliant but using some women's games would have been awesome," former US Women's Chess Champion Jennifer Shahade tweeted .

What does the show get wrong about chess?

According to chess master Irina Berezina , The Queen's Gambit does an impressively accurate job of depicting chess games. But there's one thing it takes artistic license with: talking during chess matches. Normally, the etiquette is that you talk only to say check, checkmate or offer a draw. Beth has a little more to say than that, making sure to tell Harry Beltik, for example, that she doesn't think he can escape checkmate. "Maybe. If you'd gotten here on time."

Related stories

• The Haunting of Bly Manor ending explained, and all your questions answered
• The Crown season 4 ending explained, and all your questions answered
• The 52 best TV shows to watch on Netflix
• The 32 best movies to watch on Netflix

Who's Iepe Rubingh?

The Queen's Gambit is dedicated to Iepe Rubingh, the inventor of chess boxing, who died aged 45 in May this year of unknown causes. Chess boxing is a hybrid sport, where competitors compete in alternating rounds of chess and boxing.

Will there be a season 2?

Beth overcomes her demons to finally defeat her greatest rival, bringing her story to a satisfying conclusion and not seeming to tee up more for a second season. Though the actors,  including Anya Taylor-Joy , have said they're open and willing to return to their characters in future episodes, showrunner Scott Frank, whose adaptation of Tevis' book finishes at the same point as the source material, doesn't sound like he has ideas in mind for more material.

"This was the single best experience I've had in a 30-some-odd year career full of really nice experiences. So it's saying a lot," the writer-director told  Entertainment Weekly . "I have no idea how people are going to take it, but it's the first time I'm willing to admit just how happy I am. Normally I'm afraid to ever say that."

"Maybe we can just let the audience imagine what comes next," Executive Producer William Horberg told  Town & Country .

Read more : Tenet: That ending explained and all your questions answered

New Movies Coming in 2023 From Marvel, Netflix, DC and More

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Review: Beyond an Impeccable Anya Taylor-Joy, Netflix’s Tricky Ploy Pays Off

Ben travers.

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Share on LinkedIn
• Show more sharing options
• Submit to Reddit
• Post to Tumblr
• Print This Page
• Share on WhatsApp

“The Queen’s Gambit” is quite the risky proposition in itself. The seven-part Netflix limited series features an emerging star in Anya Taylor-Joy ; the breakout best known for her work in horror hits like “The Witch” and “Split” is already a favorite of critics and youths alike. And yet if her captivating performance is already a given, the surrounding story’s allure is anything but. Scott Frank ‘s adaptation of Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel focuses on a subject typically deployed in film and television as a metaphor, usually by mature writers and aimed at a similarly senior audience. Chess, after all, is rarely described as a young person’s game.

Nor is it particularly compelling to watch. Small wooden pieces being slowly slid around a tabletop doesn’t easily lend itself to absorbing cinema, especially given the challenging nature of the game itself. “Pawn Sacrifice,” “Computer Chess,” and even the Pixar short “Geri’s Game” earned praise for their depictions, but none set the world on fire.

Related Stories Netflix Buys U.S. Rights to Pablo Larraín’s ‘Maria’ with Angelina Jolie Ahead of Venice Premiere ‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2 Review: Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Series Comes Into Its Own

“The Queen’s Gambit” may be the exception. It deserves to be, and Frank’s last limited series certainly was, when he took another out-of-fashion genre — the western — and turned “Godless” into a sizable hit (considering its cultural impact ). That same delicate attention to character, sterling production design (via “Babylon Berlin’s” Uli Hanisch), and excellent performances from a well-chosen cast turn his second Netflix limited series about chess into an absorbing coming-of-age story with more on its mind than what’s on the board.

Take, for instance, its opening tease. Employing the tried-and-true flashback structure, Frank’s story starts in 1967 Paris, as a young woman (Taylor-Joy) wakes up and drags herself out of the bathtub, scrambles to put herself together in her trashed hotel suite, and knocks back a few pills with an airplane bottle of vodka before racing downstairs for her chess match. When she sits down across from her opponent, memories race through her head, and the story starts over 10 years earlier, where Beth Harmon (played by Isla Johnston as a 9-year-old) is orphaned by a car crash and sent to live at the Methuen Home for Girls.

In and of itself, this preview of what’s to come doubles as an assurance of what kind of story you’re watching. You know Beth will become a chess star. You know she’ll do so while struggling with addiction. Very soon after the time jump, you even know how her mother died and what happened to her father. “The Queen’s Gambit” isn’t a mystery, nor is it framed like a traditional sports story; you know she’s going to win — if not all, then most of the matches she plays — so the suspense isn’t derived from the games themselves. It comes from how she wins and why.

An intimate character portrait (though not at all a true story), “The Queen’s Gambit” embraces its main players so warmly it seems like any one of them could’ve carried their own series. Bill Camp plays Mr. Shaibel, the orphanage custodian who teaches Beth how to play chess via secret basement training sessions. Camp, one of our finest character actors , is arguably the third most prominent figure in the limited series, even though he maybe gets in a few dozen words. Mr. Shaibel is reserved and private; it’s only through Beth’s stubborn curiosity that he even relents to teaching her the rules, and their time transcends instructional commands on just a few well-placed instances. Yet Frank’s script and Camp’s fine-tuning make him easily relatable, understood, and deeply felt; Camp’s muted reaction to taking a picture with his prized pupil substantiates a telling moment that could’ve otherwise been forgotten.

Yet just as your attachment to Mr. Shaibel peaks, Beth is whisked away to her adopted family, and Marielle Heller, as Beth’s new mom, becomes a more-than-fitting replacement parent , er, presence. Heller, who’s better known of late for her directorial feats in “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” “Can’t You Ever Forgive Me?” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” turns in a performance that should make her as sought-after for acting roles as directing gigs. As Alma Wheatley, Heller plays a housewife made to be complacent by her flighty and demeaning husband. Mr. Wheatley (Patrick Kennedy) is always on the road and appears to have only adopted Beth in order to provide his wife with another in-house project to keep her busy.

Again, Frank’s script and the performance of it come together to finely examine the type of person Alma has become without restricting who she really is to those stereotypes. Plenty of ’50s housewives suffered the way Alma does, yet her individuality blossoms as she and Beth embark on adventures — touring the country to compete in chess tournaments, each daring to dream beyond the four walls or tiny house provided them by society.

Seeing this relationship develop is blissful entertainment on its own, but “The Queen’s Gambit” remains Beth’s story as well as Taylor-Joy’s showcase. Light on the kind of big, showy Acting scenes that draw attention to themselves (and awards voters), Taylor-Joy trusts the character, the context, and her own command to keep viewers enamored, and it works beautifully. Being so focused on the here and now helps keep audiences there with her, as many unspoken moments — especially during chess matches — only connect because of her richly detailed process. Taylor-Joy understands that people are watching her in order to grasp what’s happening in her competitions, and Frank trusts her to handle silent exposition via a quick glance or slight curl of her typically straight face. Moreover, as Beth gets older, wiser, and more confidant, Taylor-Joy subtly transforms the way she walks, the way she reacts to the world, and the way she absorbs new information. It’s so natural it’s easy to overlook, but growing up onscreen is hard, precise work, and this young talent makes it look easy.

“The Queen’s Gambit” still suffers from structural issues and a few minor pacing problems. With this many chess scenes, it’s unsurprising redundancies appear, though it’s typically not the matches that feel repetitive. A loose middle section seems like it’s been cut into episodes based on time limits rather than definitive arcs (like Frank wrote a long movie instead of a short TV show), and there’s a cleanliness to the series’ resolution that feels a bit at odds with its messy central figure. That being said, the ending is a rousing success. Frank manages to tie many of his once-disparate pieces together for a climax that’s too satisfying to tarnish with plausibility problems; how badly you want to see these moments play out should transcend any complaints about all-too-fitting writerly bookends.

Frank’s second limited series is another risk and another unexpected charmer. To say the actors’ steal the show is both true and a tad flippant toward the measured work from every department that makes these seven episodes sing. Time will tell if viewers young and old will appreciate “The Queen’s Gambit,” but they absolutely should.

“The Queen’s Gambit” is streaming now on Netflix.

Most Popular

You may also like.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening This Week
• Top Box Office
• Coming Soon to Theaters
• Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 74% Blink Twice Link to Blink Twice
• 96% Strange Darling Link to Strange Darling
• 86% Between the Temples Link to Between the Temples

New TV Tonight

• 96% Only Murders in the Building: Season 4
• 86% The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2
• 83% City of God: The Fight Rages On: Season 1
• -- Kaos: Season 1
• -- Here Come the Irish: Season 1
• 100% Terminator Zero: Season 1
• -- K-Pop Idols: Season 1
• -- Horror's Greatest: Season 1
• -- After Baywatch: Moment in the Sun: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 100% Dark Winds: Season 2
• 92% Bad Monkey: Season 1
• 33% The Accident: Season 1
• 100% Pachinko: Season 2
• 78% Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• 96% Industry: Season 3
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV

Certified fresh pick

• 86% The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2 Link to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Disney: 100 Years, 100 Essential Movies

Best Horror Movies of 2024 Ranked – New Scary Movies to Watch

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Cast on What They Fear Most About Sauron

LotR: The Rings of Power: Season 2 First Reviews: A Darker, Bolder, and More Complex Story in Every Way

• Trending on RT
• Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
• Rings of Power S2 First Reviews
• Venice Film Festival
• Fall Horror Movie Preview

The Queen's Gambit: Miniseries Reviews

There's something a little Twin Peak-y about Harmon's drug-addled world, but it is not a genre show either. This is a series about a kick-ass little girl who becomes a superhero in a highly-competitive man's world.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2022

When you start dreaming about chess after watching a single episode, you'll know you're hooked.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2022

Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely impressive in a show that glows with trust in the filmmaking process. A story around self-stimulation, power of mind, adversities, forgetting what's written and the danger of the uncontrolled. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 30, 2021

A glamorous Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't show the true cost of addiction - but rather a rose-tinted view of womanhood and paint-by-numbers redemption.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 8, 2021

While the chess matches themselves were exhilarating to witness-yes, they really were-it was the relationships Beth forms throughout the series that truly gave this stunning period piece unexpected soul.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2021

The absence of villains, especially for an American show portraying Cold War era Russians, complements the dignity of the show.

Full Review | Mar 30, 2021

Chess may be the central subject of this spectacular Netflix series, but make no mistake in thinking that The Queen's Gambit is solely about this game of strategy. It's about so much more.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 29, 2021

An empowering tale about a female chess prodigy that, thankfully for amateurs, does not get bogged down in fine details and is still satisfying to those who do know the game.

Full Review | Mar 9, 2021

...an instant classic, as meaningful to the literate over-thinker as to casual audiences, and exactly the kind of original project that rarely seemed to find purchase in cinema over the last few decades...

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 10, 2021

Jury's out, but it's one of the best series of the year, I would definitely say so. Well-crafted and directed.

Full Review | Jan 19, 2021

Not the best series Iv'e ever seen, but it's really up there. Well-crafted and fun.

It may be a surprise that a show about chess has become one of Netflix's most-streamed shows of the past couple of weeks. But it shouldn't be -- not when it is filled with standout performances and its chess competitions play out like boxing matches.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2021

Raise your hand if you anticipated a coming-of-age, period-piece drama about a female chess prodigy in the 1950s and 1960s becoming perhaps the most addictive and binge-worthy series of 2020.

Full Review | Jan 4, 2021

Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't make a single false move in The Queen's Gambit.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2020

It is a show that takes itself so seriously that, when former child actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster turns up dressed like an escapee from the Wild West, you don't know whether it's meant to be funny or not

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 29, 2020

Written and directed by Scott Frank, an Oscar nominee for his "Logan" script, "Queen's" is electrifying. Frank's direction is full of quick cuts, artful framing and beautiful shots.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 29, 2020

Yes, this is a series about a chess player, but it is more about her journey there and the heavy and deep emotions that take you through the path is what makes this a must-watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 29, 2020

It's a terrific, emotionally intelligent hour of television - one that refuses to distinguish between the cost of sporting immortality and the price of human history.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2020

One of its strengths is knowing when to leave a good thing alone - much of the dialogue is word-for-word what Tevis wrote.

"Alma's not pathetic, she's just stuck," says Beth about her adopted mother. I can't think of a better way to summarize this unfortunately arrested miniseries.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Dec 29, 2020

Find anything you save across the site in your account

“The Queen’s Gambit” Is the Most Satisfying Show on Television

In 1884, the American star chess player Paul Morphy was found dead in his bathtub, at the age of forty-seven. “The pride and the sorrow of chess is gone forever,” the Austrian chess master Wilhelm Steinitz wrote in an elegy, the following year. Morphy had begun winning citywide tournaments in his native New Orleans at the age of nine. By the time he was twenty, he was the United States champion, and by the time he was twenty-one, many considered him to be the best player on earth. In 1858, Morphy held a notorious “blindfold” exhibition, in Paris, at the Café de la Régence: he sat in one room while eight opponents sat in another and called out his moves without looking at a single board. He played for ten hours straight, without stopping to eat, and ended the night with six wins and two draws. But Morphy grew bored; he was so gifted at chess that he began to consider it a child’s game. He walked away from competition and opened a law office, but the business quickly failed. He spent his final two decades living as a vagabond on family money, growing increasingly paranoid and haunted by his former fame.

The parable of Paul Morphy and his squandered genius pops up halfway through the fifth episode of “The Queen’s Gambit,” Scott Frank and Allan Scott’s handsome, dexterous new Netflix miniseries, based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, about a female chess prodigy from Lexington, Kentucky, and her pursuit of a world title in the late nineteen-sixties. The prodigy in question, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), is speaking to her friend and sometimes lover Harry Beltik (Harry Melling), a local chess champion with capped teeth and a nebbishy demeanor. Harry, who has been living with Beth to help her train for an upcoming match against the dominant Russian champion, Borgov, in Paris, announces that he will be moving out. He realizes that he has taught Beth all he knows, and that, in turn, she has taught him that his own passion for the game will never compare to hers. As he leaves, he hands her a tattered copy of the book “Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess,” by William Ewart Napier. “You think that’s gonna be me?” Beth sneers, with a diffident jutting of her chin. “I think that is you,” Harry replies.

In Beth’s case, the sorrow that threatens to undercut her pride is not boredom with the game. She loves the game, and has since, as a young orphan, she began sneaking away from classes at the Methuen Home For Girls to play chess in the basement with the gruff janitor, Mr. Shaibel. Chess, for her, is a refuge; her trouble is everything else. When Beth was nine years old, her birth mother killed herself by crashing a car, with Beth still in it. As a teen-ager, Beth is adopted by an unhappy couple, the Wheatleys, who divorce soon after she moves in. Alma Wheatley (played, in a quietly devastating performance, by the film director and sometimes actor Marielle Heller, with a period-accurate, stilted manner of speaking that includes phrases like “my tranquility needs to be refurbished”) is a familiar type, the depressive midcentury housewife, chipper at the department store but a mess at home. She and Beth have an addiction in common: inhaling fistfuls of green tranquilizer pills in order to maintain a façade of equilibrium. Beth was first given the medication at Methuen, where she would take it at night and hallucinate chess games on the ceiling, the pieces dancing above her head like tipsy débutantes.

This premise might suggest that “The Queen’s Gambit” will be a predictable variation on the trope of the damaged genius, the poor brilliant maverick who is held back only by buried trauma. Yet the show, which begins with Beth as a child (played with a placid scowl by Isla Johnston) and then jumps forward to follow her through her teen years and early adulthood, proceeds less like a dark psychological drama or a gritty underdog sporting tale and more like the origin story of a wizard, or a superheroine. Beth is assiduous, serious, well-read, almost nunlike in her studies of strategies such as the Ruy Lopez and the Sicilian Defense (as a teen-ager, she’s so desperate to read chess magazines that she shoplifts them from the local pharmacy). We see her decimate her opponents, easily winning tournaments against men twice her age. She learns to speak Russian in anticipation of facing the Soviets one day. She plays through games by herself for hours—in her head, on the edge of the bathtub, on the kitchen counter. She rarely wavers in her confidence, and can often come across as arrogant, or at least disarmingly unflappable. When Alma discovers that Beth’s talent could be a ticket to a better life for them both—prize money, international travel, fame—Beth doesn’t resent the fact that she is soon supporting her adoptive mother (and her fondness for Gibson cocktails) but, instead, embraces their arrangement as business partners. Alma doesn’t really understand chess, but she has other skills to teach—through her, Beth is introduced to cosmetics, classical music, and her first beer, and gains a companion who is kind, if not quite maternal.

What makes “The Queen’s Gambit” so satisfying comes in large measure from the character Taylor-Joy brings to screen: a charming, elegant weirdo who delivers her lines with a cool, wintergreen snap, and never really reacts the way one might expect. Taylor-Joy, whose breakout role was in the 2015 horror film “The Witch,” starred in Autumn de Wilde’s eminently lovable new adaptation of “Emma,” and she will step into the role of Furiosa in the anticipated “Mad Max” prequel that starts filming next year. But “The Queen’s Gambit” is her star-making performance, a showcase for her particular oddball brand of elegance. Nearly every review of the series has mentioned Taylor-Joy’s eyes, which are the size of silver dollars and set far apart, giving her the appearance of a beautiful hammerhead shark. But what she brings to “The Queen’s Gambit” is a peculiar poise, a capricious hauteur that is willowy but never weak. Taylor-Joy’s background is in ballet, and as Beth she brings a subtle physicality to the game of chess. The chess masters Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini, who consulted on the show, taught Taylor-Joy how professionals move the pieces along the board, but, as she told the magazine Chess Life , she developed her own way of gliding her hands across the board. When she captures a piece, she floats her long fingers above it and then gently flicks it into her palm, like she is fishing a shiny stone out of a river. When she begins a game, she rests her chin on her delicate folded hands, like a female mantis preparing to feast, staring at her opponent with such unblinking intensity that at least once I had to glance away from the screen.

There has been some grumbling that Taylor-Joy’s twiggy beauty—as svelte, white, and doll-like as it is—undercuts the story “The Queen’s Gambit” tells; is it not enough for a woman to beat the boys without her having to look like a Richard Avedon editorial? But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. “The Queen’s Gambit,” instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style. Beth develops a prim, gamine flair for fashion with the same studied meticulousness that she brings to the chessboard, and in the course of the show her look evolves apace with her game. She spends her first chess winnings on a new plaid dress; she grows out her blunt baby bangs and adopts a more feminine, Rita Hayworth-esque waved bob. Her covetable wardrobe, of mod minidresses and boxy crepe blouses in creamy shades of mint green and eggshell, makes her a press darling, who gets asked about her look at chess junkets. Her clothing, along with the show’s dazzling interiors (not only the Wheatleys’ home, a sumptuous parade of sherbet-colored floral wallpaper, but the many swanky hotel suites that Alma and Beth stay in on the road), calls to mind the aesthetic enchantments of “Mad Men,” the nineteen-sixties period piece against which every other nineteen-sixties period piece will forever be measured (and the fervor around “The Queen’s Gambit” ’s costume design has similarly hijacked the zeitgeist, inspiring close readings in Vogue and a zazzy virtual exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum). In turn, the game of chess, in “The Queen’s Gambit,” sheds its schlubbiness and reveals a bewitching (and, it must be said, sometimes erotic) elegance. When a reporter from Life presses Beth for a juicy quote on what it’s like to be a girl competing among men, Beth demurs. “Chess isn’t always competitive,” she says. “Chess can also be beautiful.”

Without ever mentioning him by name, “The Queen’s Gambit” cleverly inverts the myth of Bobby Fischer, the famously angsty male American chess champion who was playing around the same time as Beth. Fischer was seen as the great hope of American chess during the Cold War, but he was also often erratic, antisocial, and prone to long disappearances and angry rants about the game. “The Queen’s Gambit” begins with the conventional notion of chess as a lonely sport, and with Beth among the eccentric outsiders who tend to be drawn to it. But as the story unfolds, and Beth comes of age during the sixties, experimenting with marijuana, casual sex, and unrequited crushes on fellow-players, “Queen’s Gambit” gradually discards the idea that chess dominance requires monastic isolation or a resentment of the wider world. (The Soviets are the best chess players, Beth’s on-again, off-again lover, the swaggering Benny, played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, tells her at one point, “because they play together as a team . . . Us Americans, we work alone because we’re all such individualists.”) For viewers who are less sentimental than I am, the ending of the show—in which several of Beth’s male chess buddies, including Harry, Benny, and a pair of plucky twins from the Kentucky chess circuit, place a long-distance group call to Russia to offer advice on how she can finally beat her rival—might seem too predictable, or sweet. And it is true that there is a tinge of Mary Sue fantasy to Beth, as her boys show up for her like a bevy of tuxedoed dancers escorting Liza Minnelli from the stage. But I found it moving to see Beth, who has spent so many hours and evenings studying the chess moves of dead men in books, discover that she has support among the living.

Wherever the game of chess is involved, I can’t help but think of my own late great-grandfather, Harold Meyer Phillips, a lawyer who served as President of both the Manhattan Chess Club, in the nineteen-thirties, and the United States Chess Federation, in the nineteen-fifties. He was New York State champion at one point, but this was not his proudest achievement. Like Beth, he was often compared to Paul Morphy (his official nickname in the game was “Der Kleine Morphy” or “the little Morphy”), but more for his playing than for his disposition. What Harold, who died in 1967, loved most about chess was not its difficulty, but its ability to bring people together. When Harold was eighty-nine, he wrote an article for the magazine Chessworld , and his bio stated that he had “organized more teams, exhibitions and tournaments than practically any other living chess player.” My grandfather, Harold’s son, would wax wistfully about growing up on the Upper West Side, hearing bedtime stories told by the artist Marcel Duchamp, who was one of Harold’s regular chess partners. I often heard more about who Harold played with , rather than the legends of his queen sacrifices. In our family, chess was seen as a social pastime, a clubhouse of the mind. Watching the end of “Queen’s Gambit,” I felt that Harold would have been glad to see that Beth found joy, at last, in realizing that no victory is as sweet as one that can be shared.

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

The queen's gambit.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 21 Reviews
• Kids Say 77 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Young female chess prodigy struggles with drink and drugs.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Queen's Gambit is a fictional series about a young female chess prodigy in the 1960s. Based on the novel by Walter Tevis, it deals with themes including mental illness, suicide, and addiction. Young children in an orphanage are shown being given tranquilizers (apparently legally)…

Why Age 15+?

"Damn," "hell," "c--ksucker," "f--k."

Children in an orphanage are given tranquilizers to keep them docile, causing ch

Beth's mother struggles with suicidal urges, causes a seemingly intentional car

A few scenes of couples in bed having sex; nudity implied but not graphic.

Any Positive Content?

Though Beth rises to top of her field in male-dominated world of chess, she's al

Beth stands up for herself and isn't afraid to be a rebel when she needs to be -

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Children in an orphanage are given tranquilizers to keep them docile, causing chemical dependence in some children. Beth enjoys the pills, often takes more than prescribed so she can hallucinate at bedtime -- at one point even stealing more pills and overdosing. Her adoptive mother, Alma, is a functional alcoholic who encourages Beth to become her drinking buddy. Scenes of Beth guzzling wine and spirits, as well as smoking weed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Beth's mother struggles with suicidal urges, causes a seemingly intentional car crash with Beth in the backseat. Beth deals with some verbal bullying from popular girls in school.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Though Beth rises to top of her field in male-dominated world of chess, she's also a troubled person who battles serious addiction issues. She has trouble relating to others, can alienate people with her seemingly obsessive pursuit for victory. Still, she's a very driven woman who stands up for herself when need be.

Positive Messages

Beth stands up for herself and isn't afraid to be a rebel when she needs to be -- this strength is a quality that both helps and hurts her.

Parents need to know that The Queen's Gambit is a fictional series about a young female chess prodigy in the 1960s. Based on the novel by Walter Tevis, it deals with themes including mental illness, suicide, and addiction. Young children in an orphanage are shown being given tranquilizers (apparently legally), but they also take them recreationally. The lead character struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, an issue that is furthered when her adoptive mother turns her into a drinking buddy. There are some simulated sex scenes, but no nudity. Occasional harsh language includes terms like "damn," "hell," "f--k," and "c--ksucker."

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (21)
• Kids say (77)

Based on 21 parent reviews

Beautiful period piece with a strong female lead

Best mini series ever, what's the story.

THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT centers on young Beth Harmon ( Anya Taylor-Joy ), orphaned at 9 when her brilliant but troubled mother, seemingly on purpose, crashes their car and dies. She's sent to live at The Methuen School, where the children are made docile with a daily dose of strong tranquilizers, pills that Beth soon learns to squirrel away and take for recreational purposes. Under the begrudging tutelage of a gruff janitor, she learns to play chess and displays the skills of a legitimate prodigy, besting male players many years her senior. Over time, she grows increasingly competitive, traveling the country and world with her adoptive mother and enabler Anna ( Marielle Heller ). As she matures, her fixation with chess is rivaled only by her troubles with drugs and alcohol -- an addiction that may ruin her before she achieves her goal of besting her fiercest opponent, the Russian champ Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski).

Is It Any Good?

Some elements of Beth Harmon's story stretch credulity, but this is an absolutely gorgeous-looking fairy tale, well-acted enough to gloss over some of the less believable aspects. It's not the fact that she's a chess genius that's hard to swallow, but the way this happens in the 1960s, yet she appears to face very little conflict in terms of male acceptance as she rises the ranks. Some male players scoff at the idea of a female entering their field, sure, but she's almost immediately met with respect and admiration, even if there is a touch of envy in it.

Like many savant-centered stories, this one (which is based on the novel by Walter Tevis) attempts to examine the complexities of fame and genius -- the idea that someone has to be a little "crazy" to be exceptional, and how detrimental that can be to one's personal life. But even Beth's substance abuse problems don't truly threaten her until far into her career, as she is aided in her growing reliance on booze by her adoptive mother/agent Alma. This relationship is perhaps the most interesting in the series, and Marielle Heller -- better known as the director of films like Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood -- gives a nuanced performance full of pathos and genuine warmth; she should absolutely be acting more often. Anya Taylor-Joy does wonderful work here also, her still face and expressive eyes hinting at the deep pain and drive bubbling under the surface. The series may ultimately be a rags-to-riches fantasy and not so much the deep drama it aims for, but darn if it isn't a great one.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why the people around Beth are shocked that she is so good at chess, and at such a young age. Is it her gender, or maybe the time period? How different might the chess world look if more girls were encouraged to play?

What is it about playing chess that Beth finds so attractive? Given what we know about her biological mother, how might her obsessive fixation on the game relate to the "thin line between madness and genius" that she's warned about by others? Do you think this is a real thing?

Families can talk about chess. Why do you think it's remained popular over such a long period of time?

• Premiere date : October 23, 2018
• Cast : Anya Taylor-Joy , Bill Camp , Thomas Brodie-Sangster , Chloe Pirrie , Marielle Heller , Marcin Dorocinski
• Network : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• TV rating : TV-MA
• Awards : Emmy - Emmy Award Winner , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
• Last updated : June 20, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

Queen of Katwe

Brooklyn Castle

The Dark Horse

Positive role model tv for girls, drama tv for teens.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.