| United Artists Releasing | Release Date: April 26, 2024 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
59
Mixed:
3
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
PolygonApr 12, 2024
Challengers is a sharp and snappy movie, full of big emotions expressed through fast-paced dialogue in some scenes and through silent, sensual physicality in others, all shot with creative verve and aggressively in-your-face energy. Everyone in this movie is chasing sex and success, and conflating those things with each other in unashamedly provocative ways.
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IndieWireApr 12, 2024
These competitors only feel alive when they’re bound together by the mutual intimacy of being edged to the break points of their desire, and Guadagnino’s deliriously enjoyable movie doesn’t let any of its characters get off until even the most sophisticated Hawk-Eye line-calling technology on Earth would be unable to pinpoint the exact spot where tennis ends and sex begins.
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A film that volleys back and forth in time, Luca Guadagnino's Challengers builds the relationships between its leading tennis trio in exciting and exacting ways. Enhanced by layered physical performances from Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor, the result is one of the sexiest and most electric dramas of 2024.
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RogerEbert.comApr 12, 2024
Luca Guadagnino directs Challengers, a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley.
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Challengers surprised me. It’s a grandiose, propulsive, erotic follow-up to the dull, Tumblr-core emo of Bones and All, and I found myself enthralled by Guadagnino’s latest, in which three of our hottest young actors convincingly, tantalizingly explore alternating dynamics of power and sexuality
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The Film StageApr 12, 2024
It’s cleverly constructed, features the film’s best use of that patented O’Connor smile, and is exhilarating to watch unfold. That its ultimate conclusion feels perfectly attuned to the preceding narrative and its characters’ arcs, while also being impossible to predict, is no small feat.
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Challengers, in other words, comes at you like an amped-up, Adidas-sponsored “Jules and Jim”—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.
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It is a true star vehicle that asserts Faist and O’Connor as new leading men and gives further dimension to Zendaya’s already well-established profile. The humble ambition here is to charm and entertain, to arouse and amuse. This is, in that way, a refreshingly sincere and uncynical movie. Challengers may tire toward the end, but it’s scored enough points by then that a few double faults probably don’t matter.
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It might be too heady a brew for some, especially those whose appreciation of tennis is limited to strawberries and cream. On the acting front, though, it’s a virtual grand slam, Zendaya, Faist, and particularly O’Connor fine-tuning their characters’ 13-year romantic imbroglio into a lusty love match for the ages.
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Movie NationApr 25, 2024
The tennis, with augmented sound, shotmaking, balls-eye-view camera work and the like, dazzles. And whatever the strengths of the leads, the sexual dynamics of this relationship are every bit as of America at this “moment” as the beautiful biracial player’s “color” that the script takes pains to point out.
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