Metacritic reviews

I can't think of another movie that more fluently communicates the special agony and ecstasy of the game of chess.

Watson's character grows in importance until she eclipses the recessive Luzhin.

You'll find heartbreakingly star-crossed lovers, a heartless villain (Wilson) and a dazzling backdrop of aristocratic life before and after the Russian Revolution.

Gorris has beefed up the role of Natalia (Watson), with the end result that the film's emphasis is appropriately divided between the two characters in an emotionally satisfying way.

Handsome and well-acted, yet it can't hold a pawn to Nabokov's harrowing and moving character study.

The film is elegiac and sad, beautifully mounted, but not as compelling as it should be.

An attractive, intelligent film that's intractably at odds with itself.

In the end, it demonstrates all over again the virtual impossibility of doing Nabokov justice on film, because his work is so resolutely and brilliantly made of words.

When the film sticks with the eccentric comedy of a highborn woman attracted to a preoccupied genius, it works splendidly. When it strays into melodrama, it is as ill-equipped as Luzhin.

It's one of those period dramas about upper-crust Europeans in vacation resorts, which at first we think we've seen a million times before.