Challengers

The director of Challengers, the 52-year-old Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, is an ardent student of desire. In all its forms. Guadagnino spent much of his thirties and the first half of his forties with his spiritually connected, self-described Desire trilogy of films—ending with the tender, wondrous and deeply-felt Timothée Chalamet-led Call Me by Your Name. He expanded on the coming-of-age theme with his sensitive and sensual eight-part HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are. It can get weird, too, as it did with the cannibalistic teenagers—Chalamet among them—in the love-amidst-the-horror of Bones and All. But never has Guadagnino’s work been so propulsive, so enticing, and so engrossing before. That is what he accomplishes on Challengers.