Unlike Luca Guadagnino’s last effort, the unforgettable cannibal romance road trip movie Bones and All, his new film, Challengers, has very little in the way of graphic violence. The closest it comes is a wrenching scene depicting a torn ACL during a tennis match. Still, the emotional and psychological stakes underpinning this tale of elite athletes, insatiable ambition, and a fraught love triangle proves again how deft Guadagnino is at foregrounding human connection – and the messy emotions that come with it – no matter the broader subject matter of the movie.
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The Bikeriders is, on the whole, enchanted by its subjects’ nihilism. Nichols’s deep curiosity about human behavior and his non-judgmental, empathetic artistic style makes his film about small-scale fascism an engrossing portrait of our endless capacity for love and hate.
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Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is an absolute delight. The spell it casts is more hypnotic than that of the original film version, which won the award for Best Picture at the 34th Academy Awards. This new version has also been nominated for Best Picture, and knowing Hollywood’s regard for its own history and mythological status, I wouldn’t be surprised if West Side Story is the Best Picture winner at the 94th Academy Awards as well.
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