Challengers (15)

Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist play a trio of tennis players whose lives are inextricably connected in an uproariously sexy love triangle.

Zendaya is Tashi, a former superstar tennis player turned coach, now married to her single client, Art (Faist) a tennis player who’s way off his game these days, is going out to patently inferior players. But fiercely focused Tashi comes up with a plan: he will slum it on the ATP Challenger Tour to match with some no-hoper whom he can crush.

But to his horror, Art is matched with his former best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend Patrick (O’Connor). Patrick has fallen on hard times, but maybe trouncing Art will impress Tashi, with whom he is, of course, still deeply in love.

This sexually-charged psychodrama is the sort of barbed character study that Gudagnino has turned into a fine art throughout his career. The characters in this central love triangle are stubborn and reckless and desperate in their own ways. Every teasing frame, with its sweat-locked curls of hair and muscled thighs emerging out of tiny shorts, triggers an intoxication.