Review: 'Challengers' presents a sexy love triangle that shows why Zendaya is the star of her generation

It was only a matter of time — after scoring two Emmys for “Euphoria” and playing the girlfriend roles in three “Spider-Man” movies and “Dune: Part Two” — before Zendaya would get a movie to shine as the powerful star that she is.

“Challengers,” a sexy love triangle set in the world of professional tennis, is that movie. And Zendaya is spectacular in it, matched well with male stars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, all helmed by director Luca Guadagnino — who finds in his leading lady the perfect person to act out his sexual power dynamics.

Zendaya plays Tashi Donaldson, who we meet at a tennis tournament where her husband, Art Donaldson (Faist), whom Tashi coaches, is the odds-on favorite to win. But there’s a surprise at this tournament: A late entry by a journeyman player, Patrick Zweig (O’Connor). And to say Tashi, Art and Patrick have some history is understatement.

The script, by first-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, takes us back 13 years, when Art and Patrick are best friends, on the rise in the juniors tennis circuit. At one tournament, they meet Tashi, a phenom player who’s on her way to be one of the greats. After the tourney, the three of them are together in a hotel room and … well, if you’ve seen the trailer, you have some idea of what happens next.

In the intervening years, Guadagnino shows us how the guys’ competitive nature spilled off the court and onto their dealings with Tashi, who goes from dating Patrick to marrying Art. The boys, though, aren’t Tashi’s primary focus — she doesn’t think love means nothing, as the old tennis joke goes, but the game means more. And when her dreams of Grand Slam titles are sidelined by a knee injury, she becomes determined to channel her tennis knowledge and drive into Art. 

In the movie’s terms, Zendaya is the champion in every way. Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who also collaborated with the director on “Call Me By Your Name” and “Suspiria”) gravitate toward her at every opportunity — who wouldn’t? — and she matches that attention with a performance that’s blazing with intensity. The intimate scenes she shares with O’Connor (“The Crown”) and Faist (“West Side Story”) are fiery and passionate, and not for a moment is she not in control.

I can’t say much about the ending, the rare sports showdown where the winner isn’t pre-ordained. It’s for sure going to get people talking. Some may find it a cheat, but I believe it’s the only way — knowing what we know about these characters and what matters to them — it could have played out, and it gives “Challengers” an added delightful twist.

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‘Challengers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity. Running time: 131 minutes.

Review: 'Boy Kills World' is a bloody mess of an action movie, whose brains don't quite match its bravado

The blood-drenched action orgy of “Boy Kills World” should be everything a lover of over-the-top mayhem could hope for — breathtaking martial-arts moves, copious violence and bodies splattering like ketchup bottles dropped from a great height.

So why does this exercise in excess by rookie German director Moritz Mohr feel so draining? I think it’s because the movie can’t resist nudging the viewer in the ribs every five minutes to point out how clever it thinks it is.

The movie’s title hero, known to us only as Boy, is interoduced as a child (played by Nicholas and Cameron Crovetti), ruthlessly trained by a character known as Shaman (played by the Indonesian martial-arts star Yayan Ruhian) to be a killing machine. Boy is taught, quite brutally, to sacrifice all comfort and emotion to train his body to kill Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the oligarch who runs the nearby city-state. 

Boy believes that Hilda is responsible for killing his mother and forever separating him from his sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), whom Boy sees as a hallucination or imaginary friend. Boy is deaf and mute, but can understand people by reading their lips — though it’s an imperfect skill. Boy also listens a lot to a voice in his head, his inner narrator, a voice based on a video game character (provided for the movie by H. Jon Benjamin, known for his roles in “Bob’s Burgers” and “Archer”).

Boy grows up under Shaman’s regimen, and as an adult (played by Bill Skarsgard) is determined to get close enough to Hilda to kill her. That’s easier said than done, with Hilda locked away somewhere in the city, surrounded by a security squad led by the toughest fighter of all, known as June 27 (Jessica Rothe). Boy finds help from two resistance fighters, Basho (“Bullet Train’s” Andrew Koji) and Bennie (Isaiah Mustafa). 

The plan is to get to Hilda through the Culling, the semi-annual ritual Hilda uses to maintain her reign of terror, where dissidents are rounded up to fight in a televised death match. Hilda’s son Glen (Sharlto Copley) is the Culling’s on-air emcee, though the brains of the operation are his wife, Melanie (Michelle Dockery), who produces the spectacle, and his brother Gideon (Brett Gelman), who writes the scripts.

There should be plenty of room in all this choreographed madness for some biting satire of the Van Der Koy’s fascist rule, the corrosive effect of TV violence or, you know, any of the targets writers Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers devise in the set-up. But the movie misses major opportunities to show it’s got brains behind the bashing.

Eventually “Boy Meets World” disappoints, delivering lots of punches but never landing a moment that’s a true knockout.

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‘Boy Kills World’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore throughout, language, some drug use and sexual references. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Unsung Hero' is an earnest and humane telling of a family's faith and togetherness — and how they paid off in the Christian music scene

Like many of the Christian-centered movies produced by brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin — a list that includes “I Still Believe,” “American Underdog,” “Jesus Revolution” and “Ordinary Angels” — the family drama “Unsung Hero” is based on a true story and captures people at a point where faith and family pull them through tough times.

What makes these movies fascinating isn’t the faith part — that’s a given in these movies — but the specific ways family comes through as the ultimate expression of love.

If this all feels too cloying and sentimental for your tastes, you can find your entertainment elsewhere. It’s not all my cup of tea sometimes, either, but I recognize when it’s being done with heart and sincerity.

People familiar with the Christian music scene — this movie’s target audience — likely know where this movie is going. It’s the origin story of Christian singing star Rebecca St. James, and of her brothers Joel and Luke Smallbone, better known as the Christian pop duo For King & Country. (The marketing, including the poster labeling this as “A For King & Country Film,” spoiled it before I did.)

The movie tells of the Smallbone family, parents David (Joel Smallbone of For King & Country, the movie’s co-director, plays his own father) and Helen (Daisy Betts) and their six children. When we first meet the family in 1991, David is a Christian concert promoter in Australia, eager to make the big time by booking the American star Amy Grant for a tour of Australia. He does so, in the midst of an economic depression, and the effort leaves him and his family deeply in debt.

Their one hope, David convinces Helen, is to take the family to the States so he can represent a Christian musician there. So the family packs up and moves to Tennessee, only to find the musician has signed with his old manager (Don Most), leaving David with no way to provide for his family. Led by Helen, though, the family rallies, taking odd jobs and pooling their dimes and dollars. They’re buoyed by David’s father, James (Terry O’Quinn), back in Australia, who reminds David that “family’s not in the way — they are the way.”

The family receives help from a couple they meet at church, Jed (Lucas Black), a songwriter in Nashville, and his wife, Kay (Candace Cameron Bure). Their charity is much appreciated by the Smallbones — though, after a while, David finds his pride is wounded and he starts to get irritated at their generosity.

By chance, the Smallbones also meet record producer Eddie Degarmo (Jonathan Jackson), who remembers David from his Australian promoter days. He recognizes that David is driven to work and support his family. Degarmo also recognizes, thanks to a tip from Jed, that the Smallbones’ eldest daughter, Rebecca (Kirrilee Berger), has an amazing singing voice and could become a star.

Joel Smallbone and co-director Richard Ramsey (they also wrote the screenplay) make the family story a celebration of a big, rambunctious family finding strength in each other. And, as the title “Unsung Hero” implies, there’s one among them carrying the biggest load — Helen, and Betts brings out the quiet dignity and no-nonsense grit she must have showed to get the family through hard times.. 

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‘Unsung Hero’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: In 'The Scargiver,' Zach Snyder delivers a humorless second chapter to his 'Rebel Moon' franchise

If there’s an overarching reaction to director Zack Snyder’s deadeningly self-serious space opera “Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver,” it’s this: That’s all there is?!?

The first chapter, subtitled “A Child of Fire,” arrived on a cloud of Netflix-provided hype last December, billed as Snyder’s triumphant return to big-budget action movies and the start of a world-building franchise. If you want a sense of how well the movie was received — in spite of Snyder’s boast that, factoring in Netflix’s algorithms, more people saw it than bought a ticket for “Barbie” — observe that the second installment is barely making a ripple in its marketing.

The thing is, I was willing to meet “Rebel Moon” halfway. I thought the first movie was boring and bloated, but I figured that was what Snyder had to do as a warm-up for part 2, which would undoubtedly be an action extravaganza from start to finish.

So it’s surprising that after all the setting-up of part one, the second part, “The Scargiver,” spends the first of its two hours setting stuff up again. We get more reminders of Kora (Sofia Boutella), the former Imperial bodyguard to the King (Cary Elwes) and his daughter, Princess Issa (Stella Grace Fitzgerald), who was framed for an assassination attempt and fled to the peaceful farm world of Veldt. And we are reintroduced to Kora’s enemy, the evil Imperial leader Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein).

The script — by Snyder, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad — also reunites with with the fighters Kora and Veldt local Gunnar (Michiel Housman) have gathered. They are: The retired general, Titus (Djimon Hounsou); the enigmant swordswoman, Nemesis (Doona Bae); the dashing warrior, Tarak (Staz Nair); and the tough-as-nails fighter Milius (E. Duffy). Each gets an extended flashback that explains what they were doing, and why they want the empire to fall.

Then, after what seems like an eternity of wooden line readings, Snyder starts the fighting. The action isn’t bad, though it often feels like Snyder is recycling moves from earlier films — especially his reliance on artfully crafted super-slow-motion. It feels like Snyder’s remaking “300,” but he gave the Spartans pew-pew laser guns.

It’s interesting to recall that Snyder reportedly pitched “Rebel Moon” to Netflix after LucasFilm rejected his pitch for a “Star Wars” movie. If so, it seems that Snyder completely missed what made the “Star Wars” franchise so memorable — not the gear or the tech, but the way George Lucas (and subsequent directors) took a cue from the classic movie serials, like “Buck Rogers” and “Flash Gordon,” that wanted to give viewers a thrill and didn’t take themselves too seriously. If there is even a milligram of humor in “Rebel Moon,” it vanishes amid all the clutter and noise.

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‘Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver’

★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, April 19, on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, brief strong language and suicide. Running time: 124 minutes.

Review: 'Abigail' is a loopy, goopy mix of horror and humor

A down-and-dirty horror movie with a surprisingly upscale cast, “Abigail” delivers a fair share of shocks, gross-out moments and enough humor to make it digestible.

We’re given just as much information as we need to start: Six criminals, none of whom know each other, have been assembled for a particular job — to kidnap the ballet-loving 12-year-old daughter (Alisha Weir) of a rich man, and hold her for 24 hours while daddy pays a $50 million ransom. The organizer, who identifies himself as Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito), has found a secluded hunting lodge where they can keep the girl while they wait.

The six are, initially, assigned fake names — the leader, Frank (Dan Stevens); the driver, Dean (Angus Cloud); the hacker, Sammy (Kathryn Newton); the muscle, Peter (Kevin Durant); the medic, Joey (Melissa Barrera); and the sniper, Rickles (Will Catlett). The girl, Abigail, is tucked away in one room, and the only one of the six who’s supposed to talk to her is Joey.

It doesn’t take long for the six to start getting squirrelly with each other — Joey helps this by accurately describing each of her cohort’s personality traits and likely past occupations. But when they figure out that Abigail’s father is a notorious crime lord with a habit of dismembering those who irritate him, Frank reconsiders whether they should keep holding the girl. 

Then — and it’s aggravating that the movie’s marketing gives away this plot twist — we all learn what Abigail’s real game is, and that suddenly the criminals are in more peril than she is.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett — they made the wickedly clever “Ready or Not” and the last two “Scream” movies, which starred Barrera — deploy a ghoulish sense of humor throughout the mayhem and blood spray. The funniest, most wicked moment comes when the surviving criminals realize what they’re dealing with, and run through everything they’ve learned from movies about killing such a monster.

Most of the cast is better than the material provided by writers Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, and seem to relish digging into the over-the-top aspects of the horror story. Barrera has proven her final-girl bonafides with the “Scream” movies, and carries the movie’s emotional weight. Among the rest of the ensemb.e, Stevens and Newton, in particular, lock in on the darkly comic and terrifying vibe being pursued.

Certainly “Abigail” could have been tighter — it takes nearly an hour to get to the big reveal on which the story pivots. But when it’s cooking, “Abigail” is bloody entertaining.

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‘Abigail’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong blood violence and gore throughout, pervasive language and brief drug use. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare' is a roisterous, but somewhat slow-moving, World War II spy action movie

It’s clear watching the rollicking World War II spy adventure “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” that director Guy Ritchie and his actors, led by Henry Cavill, were having a fun time. I just wish we, in the audience, were having as much fun.

It’s 1942, and the United States has just entered the war. Unfortunately for Britain, they have been delayed in helping out in the European theater because the Germans are roaming the North Atlantic with their U-boats, making shipments of armaments impossible. Britain’s top spymaster, Brigadier Gubbins (Cary Elwes), orders one of his junior officers, named Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox) — yes, the guy who later created the character James Bond — to come up with a plan to handle the U-boat problem. 

The answer comes in the form of an unconventional officer, Gus March-Phillips (played by Cavill), whom they find in an English prison. March-Phillips is recruited to an off-the-books mission — to sail down to an island off the coast of Equatorial Guinea and destroy an Italian supply ship that carries gear for the U-boat fleet. March-Phillips agrees, on the condition he can assemble his own team.

The team, of course, is as rough-and-tumble as he is: A Swedish assassin (Alan Ritchson), an explosives expert (Henry Golding), an Irish navigator (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and a master planner (Alex Pettyfer) who they have to spring from a Nazi POW camp. They have two more accomplices on the island, British agents — one (Babs Olusanmokun) has a cover as a club owner who caters to the criminal element, and the other a very motivated weapons expert (Eiza González) whose main assignment is to seduce and distract the island’s top-ranking Nazi (Til Schweiger).

In the hands of Ritchie, this should be a fun wartime romp, in the vein of “The Dirty Dozen” by way of “Inglourious Basterds.” For some reason – maybe the “based on a true story” label, or the distaste for making comical villains out of Nazis — the action sequences feel labored and listless.

Cavill seems happy to be unshackled from the constraints of Superman, and leans into March-Phillips’ rugged bravado. The other outstanding player here is González, who exudes charm as the deceptively lethal secret agent. Even when the rest of “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is shaky, González is stirring up a lot of trouble. 

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‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence throughout and some language. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'The Beast" is a beautiful, if sometimes obtuse, examination at love and fear across lifetimes

Technology meets reincarnation meets predestination in “The Beast,” a strange and oddly seductive dive into eccentric science fiction from French writer-director Bertrand Bonello.

The movie introduces us to Gabrielle Monnier (played by the great French actor Léa Seydoux), who in 2044 is exploring the possibility of having her DNA “purified” — a process that will, she’s told, allow her to live without feeling intense emotions, which in the future are considered a danger to society. Outside the lab, she runs into a man, Louis Lewanski (George MacKay, from “1917”), who’s contemplating the same procedure.

There’s a connection between Gabrielle and Louis, and soon the movie shows us what it is. They met in a past life, in 1910 — where Gabrielle was a pianist married to an industrialist (Martin Scali), but finding herself attracted to a visiting Londoner, Louis. And they met again in 2014, when Gabrielle was a struggling actress housesitting in L.A. and Louis is a sad loser recording videos about his virginal existence, which he blames on all the blonde women around him — including Gabrielle.

The common factor — and this comes from Henry James’ 1903 novella “The Beast in the Jungle,” which Bonello and co-writers Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit loosely adapt — is how Gabrielle, in every era, becomes paralyzed by fear and unable to act in moments of crisis. Gabrielle tries to tackle her anxieties in 2044, confiding in a comfort android, Kelly (played by Guslagie Malanda, who brilliantly played the defendant in “Saint Omer”). And, in a couple of timelines, she meets a psychic (played by Elina Löwensohn, from “Schindler’s List”) whose predictions are both oblique and to the point.

The same might be said of Bonello’s approach to the story, which handles its time jumps with deliberation, but otherwise sets its own strange rhythm as Gabrielle and Louis encounter each other not only in 1910 and 2014 but in several different years recaptured in a retro nightclub in 2024.

Seydoux is always alluring, but her attempt to unravel Gabrielle’s many lives brings out new layers of her repertoire. She’s nicely matched with MacKay (a late replacement for Bonello’s frequent collaborator Gaspard Ulliel, who died in a skiing accident before filming started), an actor whose babyface features hide a depth of intense feeling.

“The Beast” will not work for every viewer — the narrative is dense enough that there were moments where I’m still not sure what was happening. But I was fascinated to watch Bonello, Seydoux and MacKay trying to work it all out.

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‘The Beast’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violent images and some sexual content. Running time: 146 minutes; in English and French with subtitles.

Review: 'Civil War' is a harrowing and thought-provoking story of a divided America, seen through the brave and flawed journalists in the middle

A viewer is immediately drawn into witer-director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” by the terrifying and all-too plausible premise — that the United States is cleaving apart, and armed conflict is upon us, neighbor against neighbor, but with helicopters and tanks rather than the rifles and cannons of 160 years ago.

But what sticks in the memory, long after this smart and intense movie is over, is the way Garland denies us the simple dichotomy of choosing sides — our current tug-of-war of red states vs. blue states is out the window here — by making us ride along with the people in the middle: The war reporters and photographers trying to capture what’s happening on the battlefield.

Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, is a combat photographer who’s brought home the images of war around the world — so capturing those pictures in New York isn’t that much of a stretch. She notices before anyone else what looks like a suicide bomber running up to a tanker truck, and ducks behind an overturned car just before the blast hits. The dust has barely settled before she’s back to taking pictures of the carnage.

Lee and her reporting partner, Joel (Wagner Moura), go back to the hotel where the war journalists are staying. There she again sees Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young cub photographer who was at the bomb scene Lee was shooting. Jessie looks at Lee as a hero and a role model. Lee’s advice is more practical: Get some Kevlar and a helmet if you’re going to take up this line of work.

Lee and Joel have a plan to get to the heavily barricaded Washington, D.C., to get an interview and photo shoot with the President (seen and heard in pre-recorded speeches, and played by Nick Offerman) before the secessionist Western Forces, now massing in Charlottesville, Va., overrun the capital and take the White House. 

The pair load up Joel’s SUV, with “press” stenciled on the doors, with the gear they’ll need to make it through war-ravaged New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia. Reluctantly, they agree to take two other journalists as far as Charlottesville. One is Sam (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an old war horse who’s seen even more action than Lee. The other is Jessie, who quickly learns the horrific truth about covering a war — the addictive combination of revulsion, fear and adrenaline. 

Garland’s script, like the one he wrote for the zombie apocalypse “28 Days Later,” is episodic, capturing moments the four journalists experience on the road. They see war refugees in a football stadium, firefights in the distance, and awful encounters that I’m not going to spoil here. Those moments gradually have their effect on the four characters: Jessie finds her squeamishness at blood and death melting away as she channels her reactions through her viewfinder, while the others find the emotional callouses they’ve developed over the years sanded away when the battle zone is actually their home country. 

And Garland, a Brit, doesn’t take sides in our current American conflict, and doesn’t give us the false comfort of doing so, either. The secessionists are identified as an alliance of Texas and California — one conservative state, one liberal one. (Florida, being Florida, is also a breakaway combatant, but discussed more as a punchline.) Offerman could be read as channeling either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, depending on which man the viewer dislikes more. And there’s no discussion of how the war started or what principles the rival sides are defending. The war is the war, and the people, the combatants and the civilians, are too occupied with surviving it to think about the why of it.

If there is something all sides should be able to agree on, though, is that Kirsten Dunst delivers a career-defining performance. Her Lee is rough, flinty and unsmiling — someone who has done this job for years, and is determined not to be affected that the combat zone doesn’t have signs in a foreign language. Her scenes with Spaeny (who, between this and “Priscilla,” is having a great year), encountering a 20-year-old version of herself, are heartbreaking.

“Civil War” is that rare movie that works as a tense thriller and heart-pumping acton movie while watching it, while leaving the viewer with a lot to chew over on the ride home. Whether it’s a preview of America’s future seems beside the point — because it works so effectively as a fractured mirror of our unsettled present.

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‘Civil War’

★★★★

Opens Friday, April 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violent content, bloody/disgusting images, and language throughout. Running time: 109 minutes.