Game, Set, Match
With Challengers, Italian director Luca Guadagnino is serving up cinema's hottest film in years.
In This Edition:
Dish from the Challengers premiere in London!
Luca Guadagnino the Interior Designer!
Lauren Sanchez wore WHAT to the State Dinner?!
One of the sexiest movies in years is coming your way this month: Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, the story of a white-hot trio of ambitious tennis prodigies, played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor (who won an Emmy for playing Prince Charles in The Crown), and Mike Faist (the switch-blade sharp Riff in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story), who are emotionally and physically entangled on the court, and off.
With a snappy script by first-timer Justin Kuritzkes, tennis garb (and a lot of lacey lingerie) by British fashion designer Jonathan Anderson, and a vibrating score by Oscar-winning Nine Inch Nails duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Challengers feels like a flip-off to conservative politics, political correctness, and cancel culture.
It’s a throwback to the 1990s, when eroticism infused politics, music, film, television, and fashion. (Hello, Tom Ford at Gucci.) Like Guadagnino’s other movies, including A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name, and Bones and All, Challengers is about profound desire on all fronts, and is cinematic provocation at its best.
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