Taljechin,
Of course whenever you ask for an opinion, I'm more than willing to give mine!
I sat through the Luzhin Defense and was disappointed by the pacing, the chess positions (there were even cases when the board was set up wrong), by the lack of feel for the tournament halls, and by the woodenness of some of the performances.
It's not a great movie, but if you have insomnia you could do worse than rent this one. Still, it's not nearly as good as the novella by Nabokov. After that movie, I washed my brain out by watching
Dangerous Moves again.
I know, I couldn't resist putting in another plug for that movie. The positions were actually created Laszlo Szabo in Dangerous Moves. And for those who think the plot is unoriginal, kudos! In many ways, it's a recreation of the Karpov-Korchnoi Manilla match, with a few events from other world championship matches tossed in for good measure. On top of that, it won an Academy for Best Foreign Picture! How often do chess movies do that? (I'm not even sure if
Seventh Seal won, but that's more an indictment of the Academy than anything.)