The Queen's Gambit

After zipping through this gripping miniseries, I think I have a new favorite Netflix original.

Its star, Anya Taylor-Joy, is quickly becoming a favorite as well, delivering a great performance as Beth Harmon, a genius young chess player struggling with substance abuse and mental and emotional hurdles holding her back from her relationships and from true mastery of the game. She's charming, but also cool and calculated, reserved yet fun when she wants to be, and very beautiful and captivating as the lead in a big period drama like this. Her supporting cast carries their weight well, with lots of faces I've never seen, but many that I won't soon forget. The strange cowboy-esque New Yorker Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and the impos...

I was loving this (pretty much) right up until the last episode when a woke deus ex machina suddenly appears in a Corvair to save the day. The cinematography is nice and the story of triumph rolls right along sans all the normal impediments one might expect. The adoptive mother goes right along with our heroes desire to be a chess champ. I never expected that to be so easy for her, and it was a little too convenient that the father left town and never returned.

There ARE a few other implausibilities that annoyed me, like the fact that an 8 year old would become addicted to tranquilizers to the degree that Beth did. Was her mother an addict? That was never even hinted at. People generally dont develop severe addictions on their own withou...