DVD: Bobby Fischer Against the World (E)

"I regard him as a mythological combination of sorts, a centaur if you will, a synthesis between man and chess," Garry Kasparov said about Bobby Fischer.

The wild "centaur" of the chess world, who became the youngest Grandmaster at the age of 14, is examined in Liz Garbus's excellent, occasionally amusing, very often disturbing HBO documentary. It traces Fischer's journey from child prodigy to Cold War American hero – he memorably defeated the Russian Grandmaster and reigning champion, Boris Spassky, in 1972, in Reykjavík – to controversial recluse and pariah: "Fischer is a law unto himself," fellow chess champion Larry Evans once maintained. Garbus's riveting and cerebral film is strongest in the front section, which includes an awkward interview with a gauche 14-year-old Fischer, and the opening Spassky game – which a deeply paranoid Fischer forfeited – is also something to behold. A haunting "tribute" that includes interviews with those who revere his chess (Kasparov and Susan Polgar) and with the people who knew him (Larry Evans, the photographer Harry Benson) – or thought they knew him.