Every Sunday, lonely bachelor and refined judge Mladen goes to play chess with his friend, sculptor Fedji. Slowly, he engages in a love affair with Neda, Fedia's wife, and almost invisibly, a love triangle forms. Chess board is the central part of the film, as moves on the board reflect emotions of the characters.
With an ingenious script, engaging characters, nerve-shredding suspense, genuinely frightening set-pieces and laugh-out-loud funny bits An American Werewolf in London is a prime candidate for the finest horror-comedy ever made. Americans David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) are backpacking in northern England when Jack is killed by a wild beast and David is bitten. Back in London David finds himself falling in love with a nurse, Alex (played with winning charm by Jenny Agutter), and turning into a werewolf. Adding to his problems, an increasingly decomposed Jack keeps coming back from the dead, and he is not a happy corpse. The Oscar winning make-up and transformation scenes still look good and rather than send itself up Werewolf plays its horror seriously, the laughs coming naturally from the surreal situation. Naughton is engagingly confused and disbelieving, desperately coping with the ever more nightmarish world, while Landis delivers one absolutely stunning dream sequence, an unbearably tense hunt on the London Underground and a breathtaking finale. Gory, erotic, shocking and romantic, this unforgettable horror classic has it all. –Gary S Dalkin
Hannah Lee Baker is a bright teen girl trapped in the dark Southern underworld of violence and guns, meth labs and vicious biker gangs, and whose only refuge is chess. She lives with Amber, her older sister; and her uncle Donny, an addict.
Brooklyn Castle is a documentary about I.S. 318 - an inner-city school where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level - that also happens to have the best, most winning junior high school chess team in the country. (If Albert Einstein, who was rated 1800, were to join the team, he'd only rank fifth best). Chess has transformed the school from one cited in 2003 as a "school in need of improvement" to one of New York City's best. But a series of recession-driven pubic school budget cuts now threaten to undermine those hard-won successes.