CHALLENGERS (Luca Guadagnino 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

Other reviews of Challengers

I liked a gay-focused one by Samantha Allen in a publication called them and entitled "C hallengers is Deliriously Campy Queer Fun." She describes everything better than I did, the tennis, the sex, and the music. With this film, and with Guadangnino now, a more overtly gay POV than mine may be helpful also. A perceptive review and one that's on the right wavelength.

For a typical positive straight POV, David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter's first paragraph is very representative:. He calls the film "Smart, seductive and bristling with sexual tension," and "arguably Luca Guadagnino’s most purely pleasurable film to date" or at least "certainly his lightest and most playful" and "as agile and dynamic as the many tennis matches it depicts." He concludes that "It helps that the chemistry of stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist is off the charts." /[/QUOTE] "Most purely pleasurable" is purely subjective, but it may simply be this is a time when people are "ready" for this kind of hedonistic film and have arrived at a point of liking Guadagnino and knowing who he is more than they did before.

Justin Chang of The New Yorker describes Challengers as a tennis-centric version of Jules et Jim, a bit far-fetched, but suggestive.

[Chris Knipp]

Negative views of Challengers

What do they say when they don't like it?

They dwell on its chopped-up flashback structure and say it's hard to follow: I have said that. They say the catchy style and intense techno score are all that saves the plot from being "soap opera." Guadagnino and the writer "tell the story out of order, jumping around in time so often that it becomes tiresome, especially since there is so little forward-moving plot" - says Kyle Smith of Wall Street Journal