Challengers

After an uneven patch Luca Guadagnino (Queer; Call Me By Your Name) snaps back into gear with this perversely entertaining screwball comedy masquerading as a sports film. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist are up and coming tennis prodigies and fast friends who both have the hots for Zendaya — who’s a little ahead of them in the game (and stays that way). Volleying back and forth across a decade or so with the speed of a championship rally, Challengers charts the oscillating fortunes of this trio of frenemies on the court, and in courtship. The editing (Marco Costa) and cinematography (by Thai DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) in this movie are dazzling to behold, and the Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score is simply bonkers. If Lubitsch had been born a century later, he’d undoubtedly be making sexy, fun, lightly subversive films like this.

Challengers goes by in a flash. Its ending is an erotic thunderclap. By the time it’s over, you don’t know what smacked you, but it felt like love.

Stephanie Zacherek, Time

This is a startlingly entertaining, erotically charged movie that hits its many targets with a kind of ferocious and crazed accuracy.

Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

A funny, tempestuous, and exuberantly lusty story about how three athletic demigods see their destinies upended. And Guadagnino tells it the way he knows best, with a sometimes exasperating but ultimately irresistible surfeit of style.

Justin Chang, New Yorker

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