Challengers

 Despite trailers and promos that suggest otherwise, Luca Guadagnino's Challengers is NOT a love story -- at least not in any conventional sense. His earlier cinematic triumph, Call Me By Your Name (2017), was a romantic tour de force. Challengers, though scorching hot, is not about romance as much as it is about control and, well, courtship.

Three impossibly attractive people are at the center of this unconventional but captivating story -- Tashi, a beautiful former college tennis standout sidelined by a dream-killing injury (a radiant Zendaya); who is living vicariously through her struggling husband, Art, whom she coaches and whom she might resent just a little (a soulful Mike Faist of West Side Story); and their old friend, Patrick, an under-accomplished fellow tennis player (a thoroughly engaging Josh O'Connor of The Crown and Emma.) who possesses a powerful serve but more magnetic brio than follow-thru.

The film, imaginatively constructed and shot, pieces together the co-mingling of these three lives over the years, beginning when they were teens on the junior circuit through their mid-30s. It is to their credit that the three leads pull off aging undetectably even as their characters go through marked changes -- some welcome, some surprising.

Guadagnino's flashy on-court set pieces might be a tad over-the-top for some viewers, but I think they are part of the auteur's mission to push the boundaries of narrative and visualization (see A Bigger Splash, Suspiria and I Am Love, for example). I thought they were inspired.

Guadagnino does not avert the camera's eye from naked flesh but makes clear through the characters' actions and words that sex is a tool, and despite being intense lacks true expressiveness and commitment.

This fits because Tashi, Art and Mike don't seem to be fully able to give themselves over to anything or anyone except what they can't have, which might suggest that no matter how hard they try they'll never be real winners.

Civil War

 

Writer / director Alex Garland relies on the audience's familiarity with societal divisiveness to provide the backdrop for his intense and visually stunning apocalyptic odyssey Civil War.

Set in the not-too-distant future -- maybe just months away -- Civil War follows a quartet of combat journalists (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny) as they race against the clock and the deterioration of law and order to make it from New York City to Washington, D.C., where rebel forces are descending on a totalitarian regime, headed by a populist, clueless president (Nick Offerman) who has turned the military against American citizens.The reporters must take a circuitous route through a mix of bombed-out urban devastation and rural detachment.

Audiences are invited to fill in the movie's gaps with whatever narrative they like but to keep their eyes and ears open for the mayhem and the carnage, which is unending. I trust Garland understood the dysphoria of the landscape he was creating; government and rebel combatants are indistinguishable. War obliterates the distinction between the good and the bad. Members of the press are marked with reflector vests that are no protection from the barrage and they succumb to their worser instincts, too.

And in that is the real power of Civil War -- the focus on the role of the press to capture what is happening. Steely nerves. Unswerving eyes. But also, and most disturbingly, a gradual moral decay that turns them into agents of spiritual decline. This becomes chillingly apparent in the movie's breathless last reel.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

 

Guy Ritchie's best pictures are caper confections that feature a coterie of criminals and con artists , most of whom have hearts of gold ... or at least burnished brass.

This is true of Ritchie's latest, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which stars Henry Cavill as the admittedly screwed-up leader of a band of equally mad incorrigibles (Eiza González, Alan Ritchson, Henry Golding and Alex Pettyfer, among them) commissioned by Winston Churchill to destroy a German ship that supplies the Nazi u-boats that have barricaded the Atlantic and kept America from coming to Britain's aid. The ship is docked off of the coast of Africa at a nearly impenetrable port -- nearly.

Based on true events, the scheme -- and it's as elaborate and outrageous as one might imagine from a Ritchie enterprise-- is completely off the books. If captured by the Germans, the team would be tortured and shot, and if discovered by the British, they would be imprisoned. These prospects only serve as more incentive for the crew.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is Mission: Impossible (Improbable?) with fewer stunts but with barrels more blood p cheeky humor -- much of it provided by Cavill. Who woulda thunk it?

Shogun

 

A friend and I have been exchanging thoughts about FX's Shōgun streaming on Hulu. He tells me he is fascinated by the symbolism of the various tokens passed among the main characters -- samurai swords and game birds, among them -- and what the program creators are saying with such cryptic markers. I agreed and told him I find especially intriguing how opaque the characters are -- their motives hidden behind clouds of deception, ego or tradition. With so many years -- more than 40 -- having passed since the original television adaptation of Clavell's 1975 novel, it is quite likely the story will be unexplored territory for many viewers ... which serves this latest elaborate entry quite well. Shōgun is best enjoyed, I believe, when the full intentions of the story's many characters are as murky as Japan's foggy coastline. Yes, the "mission" of the Jesuits and their Portuguese musclemen seems clear, if not entirely godly, but is it? And survival seems to be the prime motivation of the sea wise British navigator who is fiercely loyal to his aging Protestant monarch but might be moved even more by greed. And the motives among the Council of Regents seems pretty apparent, but might be revealed more by what is not said than what is. And the subservience of the trussed and obi-ed courtesans might come across a tad cagey considering many are more ingenious than the men they are bound to, but I suspect there is a great deal more underfoot, like the shifting tectonic plates that threaten to lay waste to all life. Wonderful stuff!

3 Body Problem

 

The Netflix series 3 Body Problem uniquely introduces the battle between truth and falsehood.

The very literal-minded alien colonists in a 400-year-long journey do not understand the human penchant for deception and fiction. Their introduction to these ideas is Little Red Riding, a story rooted in the dangers of falseness.

Because humans appear to revel in misleading and deceiving one another, the aliens decide humans can not be trusted. "We are afraid of you," they declare before ceasing communication with their Earthling contacts.

The moment is chilling for the perspective being offered about our culture and practices, how routine dissembling and pretense are for us. How much we get out of lying to one another -- and ourselves.

Ironic that a work of fantasy would place so much emphasis on the dangers of make-believe.

Monkey Man

Dev Patel's terrific directorial debut, Monkey Man, is set in a teeming Indian city where the wealthy castes live and party in high-rise splendor and the low-born, outcasts and untouchables swelter in congested outskirts where they compete for scraps and opportunities to be exploited by their betters.

Patel is the nameless monkey-masked combatant in nightly underground matches where he takes dives after being pummeled by opponents. His punishing existence hides a consuming desire to avenge his mother (Adithi Kalkunte), who was murdered during a purge by government agents looking to expand the city's holdings.

After a failed attempt to assassinate the chief of police (Sikandar Kher), which leaves him nearly dead, the fighter is rescued by a community of transgender monastics, patched up, and in the style of many films of righteous underdogs, rebounds with new battle skills and vision. His guide through this recovery is the wise priestess of the temple, played by Vipin Sharma, who challenges the fighter to "get up" and meet his fate, leading a revolt against corruption and exploitation.

Patel's highly impressive film borrows more than a little from the John Wick playbook in its kinetic energy and enormous body count -- its fight sequences are astounding -- but it also has a unique distinction and cultural significance that nonetheless resonates in the U.S., where the poor and marginalized also must contend with one another and their oppressors.

Hero (2024)

 

Dustin Whitehead's Hero, screening now at the Nickelodeon, is an energetic film with a committed cast of local actors in the story of a young man, Tre, who is on a meandering lifepath that ultimately brings him around to self-realization and fulfillment. A production of Columbia-based Local Cinema Studios, Hero stars Anthony Currie as Tre; Columbia theater veteran Darion McCloud as his doting father, Wayne; and Carly Siegel as Jess, Tre's ex-girlfriend who is facing her own challenges. The screenplay by Myles Isreal, who appears as Tre's best friend and fellow cosplay competitor Damon, covers a lot of emotional territory -- exploring tough terrain of interpersonal relations, missed opportunities and recovery with insight and spirited good humor. A tender and promising labor of love, Hero was shot all around Columbia, so spotting familiar landscapes is an added bonus.