Tennis isn’t just a game—it’s a relationship, a thing that you share and something that happens between people. It’s also a rare thing, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) tells two boys she’s just met: In a match, you may only see this real form of tennis for as little as 15 seconds. Challengers—directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) and written by novelist and playwright Justin Kurtizkes —follows the relationships between Tashi and those two boys, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), and the changing fortunes (and rankings) of their tennis careers. Following the trio from their teenage years to adulthood and from tennis stardom to career doldrums, the film is a competent sports movie, argues Erin Schwartz in their review, but what is most interesting about the film is found in its details—especially, the kinetic and often experimental cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom that captures all the physical tension and idiosyncratic flourishes that go into the life of a tennis player. At first, Schwartz writes, “It’s hard to understand exactly what” Duncan means when she talks about the relationships in tennis but by “the end of Challengers,” we see how “tennis…is a form of raw interpersonal competition, distilled from wanting to kill someone or fuck them—or both.” Read “The Only Relationship That Matters in “Challengers””