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Challengers review: Zendaya's bright, sexy and witty tennis love triangle is a smash, writes BRIAN VINER
BRIAN VINER: The Italian director Luca Guadagnino certainly can't be accused of making boring films. His last, 2022's Bones And All, was about cannibalistic serial killers.
He's broke and has to sleep in his car on the eve of a low-ranking Challengers Tour event in New Rochelle, New York, unaware that the tournament has an exciting wild-card entry, tennis's poster boy, Art, who is trying to get some easy wins under his belt in readiness for the US Open. Challengers is not a classic, and might not even be one of Guadagnino's best three movies, but it's bright, sexy, witty and fun, and says enough about the demands of elite tennis and how it affects relationships to be considered a bona fide sports film, even though — and this is a double-fisted backhanded compliment — it's really just about a love match. In Ordinary Angels, Hilary Swank plays an alcoholic Kentucky hairdresser who finds purpose in her miserable life by helping a widower (Alan Ritchson, best-known as Jack Reacher in the Amazon Prime Video series) raise the funds to pay for a vital organ transplant for his young daughter.
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