With Robert serving as her mentor and her mother playing the unsupportive parental figure who thinks she should face reality and give up on her dream, Queen Of Katwe is too dramatically tidy, each step of PhionaРІР‚в„ўs remarkable path neutered of drama until it seems preordained. Quickly, sheРІР‚в„ўs the best of the group.)Р”В«ut these precise cultural observations start to feel like mere grist for what is ultimately a familiar underdog story. (When Robert opens his chess program to KatweРІР‚в„ўs children, the boys insist she has no place competing against them. ThatРІР‚в„ўs even truer for a young girl like Phiona, who faces resistance asserting her independence simply because sheРІР‚в„ўs a girl. Discovering that Phiona seems gifted at the game, he encourages her to enter competitions, in large part because he wants her to think about escaping a world in which she canРІР‚в„ўt even afford schooling.Р”В«ased on a 2011 ESPN The Magazine profile, NairРІР‚в„ўs first feature since The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a tasteful, sympathetic look at people learning to cope in difficult circumstances. She soon meets Robert (Oyelowo), who has a passion for chess that he wants to pass along to the local kids. Set in the impoverished Ugandan community of Katwe, the film introduces us to Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), a young, vivacious girl who lives with her siblings and widowed mother Harriet (NyongРІР‚в„ўo) in the mid-2000s. But outside of the family-film crowd, Disney may have a tough time wrangling audiences to this true-life tale. The presence of David Oyelowo and Oscar-winner Lupita NyongРІР‚в„ўo will spark interest, as will the storyРІР‚в„ўs sports-movie framework. Premiering in Toronto, Queen Of Katwe is set to arrive in US theatres on September 23. Queen Of Katwe is too dramatically tidy, each step of PhionaРІР‚в„ўs remarkable path neutered of drama until it seems preordained. Perhaps itРІР‚в„ўs simplistic to say that director Mira Nair has fashioned a good-looking but Disney-fied version of actual events, and yet the studioРІР‚в„ўs predictably uplifting-at-all-costs blandness slowly but methodically drains the material of its richness. Queen Of Katwe tells a potentially touching story in the stodgiest of ways, its recounting of the journey of a young Ugandan chess prodigy sensitively rendered but also far too formulaic.

Queen of katwe review