Challengers is the best tennis film ever made. That's not a high bar — the genre is famously weak — but I mean it as genuine praise.
Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom figured out something that eluded tennis filmmakers before them: the drama isn't in the shot. It's in the preparation, the waiting, the reading.
What they got right
The ball-cam sequence. When the camera becomes the tennis ball, traveling between Tashi, Art, and Patrick in slow motion, the geometry of the game becomes legible to non-tennis audiences. You understand the angles, the positioning, the pressure. It's technically brilliant and emotionally correct.
The footwork is real. Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor trained extensively, and it shows. Their splits, their weight transfer, the way they recover after wide balls — it looks like tennis played by actual humans, not actors hitting marks.
The mental game between characters maps accurately to actual match psychology. The serving games, the double faults under pressure, the momentum shifts after an error — Guadagnino clearly studied the sport beyond the aesthetics.
The one thing that bothered me
The scoring. Without spoiling the ending: what happens in the final game of that final set would not, in that moment, play out quite that way. The emotional logic is perfect. The tennis logic has a small hole.
But I'm a tennis coach being picky. Every non-tennis person I've spoken to about this movie thought it was completely believable from start to finish.
Go see it. See it in a theater if you can. Put it on the list alongside Challengers, not below it.
And yes, I've thought more carefully about Tashi's backhand mechanics than I should admit.