QUEEN OF KATWE

Yes — and take the older kids. This is a true story, beautifully made, about a girl named Phiona who discovers chess in the slums of Uganda and uses it to lift her family out of poverty. The acting, cinematography, and editing are all first-rate, and the story is the kind that leaves you both moved and inspired.

What makes it more than just a good sports drama is what it believes. A Christian ministry teaches these children to play, and prayer, sacrifice, and hard work run through the whole film. A widowed mother fights fiercely to keep her children out of harm's way. This is a family story with a real moral spine.

The cautions are minor: a little blood from an accident, one mild profanity, and some implied content about sex outside marriage that younger children won't register. For older children and up, this one is well worth the trip.

Phiona is a pre-teen girl in the slums of Katwe, Uganda, where she and her siblings sell corn maize on the street to help support their widowed mother. One day she follows her brother to a building where a coach teaches local children to play chess. The other kids tease her at first — but once she learns the game, she can't stop thinking about it. As her talent grows, her family faces a hard choice about how much of her time chess is allowed to take.

Four stars, and they're earned. This is top-quality filmmaking: strong performances (many from young, previously unknown Ugandan actors), visually striking cinematography, and crisp editing that keeps a true story moving with real emotional weight. The film is uplifting and poignant without tipping into sentimentality, and it handles its young, largely non-professional cast with confidence — the performances land as genuine rather than coached. It's the rare family drama that satisfies as craft and not just as message.

This is a strongly Christian, biblical film, and it wears that faith openly rather than apologetically. The children learn chess through a church ministry; they pray, eat, and play together, and the Lord's Prayer appears onscreen. The coach turns down more lucrative work to keep serving the underprivileged children of Katwe. A widowed mother fights to keep her family together and her children away from lives of drinking, money, and sexual compromise. Hard work, sacrifice, and family loyalty are treated as things worth admiring — because they are.

The film doesn't dodge doubt, either. One young woman in the story rebels against her mother and, in effect, against God's claim on her life — and the film lets her face real consequences rather than smoothing them over. That's a more honest treatment of sin and its fruit than most family films attempt.

At its center, Queen of Katwe is a story about a girl who is poor in circumstance but rich in unseen worth — and about people willing to see that worth before the world does. Scripture says it plainly: "Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom?" (James 2:5).

Queen of Katwe is the kind of family film that's rare on any release calendar: excellent craft in service of a story that actually believes in prayer, sacrifice, and hard work. It earns its place on family movie night. Worth the trip — ages 10 and up.