The Luzhin Defence

A headstrong heiress, an unstable chess master and an all-important tournament in an Italian resort town form the center of this oddly bloodless film — simultaneously a romance, a psychological thriller, a parable of addiction, a celebration of eccentricity and a heartfelt condemnation of bourgeois intolerance. It's hard to imagine Vladimir Nabokov, from whose novel The Defense (1930) it's adapted, writing anything so schematic and naive; his slippery brilliance is notoriously brittle, wrapped up in sophisticated word games and diabolically fractured narrative structure. Dutch director Marleen Gorris's film, by contrast, is self-righteous, reductive and b...