''Magnus'' is a 2016 documentary film by about the early life of Norwegian

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...

prodigy

Magnus Carlsen Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen (born 30 November 1990) is a Norwegian chess grandmaster who is the reigning five-time World Chess Champion. He is also a three-time World Rapid Chess Champion and five-time World Blitz Chess Champion. Carlsen has h ...

, him becoming a Grandmaster at age 13 and winning the FIDE World Chess Championship in 2013. The film premiered at

Tribeca Film Festival The Tribeca Festival is an annual film festival organized by Tribeca Productions. It takes place each spring in New York City, showcasing a diverse selection of film, episodic, talks, music, games, art, and immersive programming. Tribeca was f ...

in 2016, and was sold to 64 countries.

Premiere

''Magnus'' premiered at

in 2016. and became the first Norwegian feature documentary to have its world premiere at the festival.

did not attend to the premiere of the film, but his family was present. The film became the fastest sold out film at the festival that year, and the artistic director at

Frederic Boyer said the film was one of his favorites that year.

Critical reception

''Magnus'' received mostly positive reviews from film critics. It holds a 81% approval rating on review aggregator website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, based on 21 reviews, with a

weighted average The weighted arithmetic mean is similar to an ordinary arithmetic mean (the most common type of average), except that instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others. The ...

of 6.2/10. BBC put the film on its top 10 list, November 2016, as the only documentary on the list, calling the film: "[...) an intimate look Carlsen’s extraordinary life through archive footage, home movies and interviews.". Later BBC published a behind the scenes featurette about the film, showing a clip of

playing blindfolded chess against 10 lawyers at Harvard University, beating them all.

Notable awards

*''Global Future Prize'' – Oulu International Children’s and Youth Film Festival. *''The Ray of Sunshine'' – The NorwegianFilm Festival. *''Audience Award'' – Docville

References

External links

* *Magnus o
Rotten TomatoesBBC Featurette
Films about chess 2016 documentary films 2016 films 2010s English-language films Magnus Carlsen {{Bio-documentary-film-stub