movie reviews nytimes

Advertisement

Supported by

Movie Reviews

Our film critics on blockbusters, independents and everything in between., latest articles, results sorted by select sort order newest oldest, the watchers.

• Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
• Directed by Ishana Shyamalan

The folk-horror genre welcomes a young new voice in the director Ishana Night Shyamalan, but she’s singing a familiar old tune.

By Elisabeth Vincentelli

Banel & Adama

• Directed by Ramata-Toulaye Sy

The filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates this elliptical story, set in unnamed Senegalese village, with daubs of strong colors and strikingly vivid imagery.

By Manohla Dargis

• Comedy, Drama
• Directed by Savi Gabizon

Richard Gere plays it way too cool as a man learning about the son he didn’t know he had.

By Ben Kenigsberg

I Used to Be Funny

• NYT Critic’s Pick
• Directed by Ally Pankiw

The film, which stars Rachel Sennott as a stand-up comedian, looks at the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield.

By Amy Nicholson

• Directed by Daina Oniunas-Pusic

Julia Louis-Dreyfus journeys from denial to acceptance in this imaginative fantasy-drama about grief and motherhood.

By Jeannette Catsoulis

• Comedy, Drama, Romance
• Directed by Stephanie Allynne, Tig Notaro

Dakota Johnson stars in an expansive friendship comedy about coming out in your 30s and finding yourself.

By Alissa Wilkinson

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

• Action, Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Thriller
• Directed by Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah

In their latest buddy cop movie, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are still speeding through Miami. The franchise has rarely felt so assured, relaxed and knowingly funny.

By Robert Daniels

The Dead Don’t Hurt

• Drama, Western
• Directed by Viggo Mortensen

Mortensen gives his film a nested, at times unnecessarily complicated structure, but with performances this good, it’s hard to mind much.

Young Woman and the Sea

• Biography, Drama, Romance, Sport
• Directed by Joachim Rønning

Daisy Ridley plays Gertrude Ederle, who persuades her father to pay for swim lessons, and then goes on to be a pioneer.

By Glenn Kenny

Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle

• Animation, Comedy, Drama, Sport
• Directed by Susumu Mitsunaka

This film extends the story told in an anime series about high school volleyball teams.

By Maya Phillips

The Young Wife

• Directed by Tayarisha Poe

A beleaguered bride spirals on her wedding day in Tayarisha Poe’s stylish but overly familiar comedy-drama.

By Devika Girish

The Great Lillian Hall

• Directed by Michael Cristofer

Jessica Lange is ideally cast as a grande dame of the theater who is facing a reckoning in this well-crafted melodrama by Michael Cristofer.

In a Violent Nature

• Drama, Horror, Thriller
• Directed by Chris Nash

Chris Nash’s ultraviolent horror movie is an unexpectedly serene, almost dreamlike meditation on a murderous psyche.

• Directed by Tony Goldwyn

This drama centers on a boy with autism and his divorced dad, with a cast featuring Robert De Niro, Rose Byrne, Whoopi Goldberg and Bobby Cannavale.

By Natalia Winkelman

• Directed by D.W. Waterson

This queer high school movie, starring Devery Jacobs and Evan Rachel Wood, channels an after-school special without the coming-out trauma.

By Lisa Kennedy

Robot Dreams

• Animation, Drama, Family, Music
• Directed by Pablo Berger

This animated film from Pablo Berger is a silent wonder that says everything about love.

Handling the Undead

• Drama, Horror, Mystery
• Directed by Thea Hvistendahl

A zombie movie is wrapped in a gentle tale of mourning and love.

MoviePass, MovieCrash

• Documentary, Comedy, Crime, Drama
• Directed by Muta'Ali Muhammad

An illuminating documentary about the ill-fated (though now-revived) subscription service finds an unexpected story.

• Action, Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller
• Directed by Brad Peyton

Jennifer Lopez stars in a sci-fi action thriller that wonders whether artificial intelligence is really all that bad.

The Beach Boys

• Documentary, Biography, Music
• Directed by Frank Marshall, Thom Zimny

This Disney documentary looks at the family ties and sweet harmonies that turned a California band into a popular treasure.

By Nicolas Rapold

• Drama, Romance
• Directed by Sophie Dupuis

Sophie Dupuis’s sensitive French Canadian drama takes a turn when a young, starry-eyed drag queen (Théodore Pellerin) opens up to questionable figures.

By Beatrice Loayza

Queen of the Deuce

• Documentary, Biography
• Directed by Valerie Kontakos

This warm remembrance of a Times Square legend is too careful with its iconoclastic heroine.

• Biography, Drama, History
• Directed by Andrew Hyatt

Based on the real life of the pioneering ophthalmologist Ming Wang, this movie follows the character’s struggle to see inside himself.

The Garfield Movie

• Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy
• Directed by Mark Dindal

Garfield, voiced by Chris Pratt, is joined by Samuel L. Jackson as his father, in an inert big-screen adaptation that fundamentally misunderstands its protagonist.

By Brandon Yu

• Action, Comedy, Crime, Romance
• Directed by Richard Linklater

Glen Powell stars in one of the year’s funniest, sexiest, most enjoyable movies — and somehow it’s surprisingly deep, too.

Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara

• Drama, History
• Directed by Marco Bellocchio

This film, based on a true story about the kidnapping of a Jewish child in 19th-century Italy, underscores the devastating consequences of family separation.

The Strangers: Chapter 1

• Directed by Renny Harlin

A reboot of the 2008 home invasion film “The Strangers” brings back masked assailants and brutal violence but leaves originality behind.

By Erik Piepenburg

• Documentary
• Directed by Richard Shepard

The director Richard Shepard details his lifelong obsession with movies in this enthusiastic video essay.

By Calum Marsh

• Directed by Hong Sang-soo

The Korean director Hong Sang-soo winds together the slenderest strands of two intersecting stories to make a tender film about simple pleasures.

• Animation, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy
• Directed by John Krasinski

The film is a slim story about a girl named Bea (Cailey Fleming) who helps a crank named Cal (Ryan Reynolds) play matchmaker. Oh, and Bradley Cooper is a glass of ice water.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

“Tár,” Reviewed: Regressive Ideas to Match Regressive Aesthetics

By Richard Brody

The conductor James Levine was fired from the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 following accusations that he had sexually abused four men—students of his—three of them when they were teen-agers. The conductor Charles Dutoit resigned his post with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that same year after he was accused of sexual assault by several women. (Both men denied the accusations.) In Todd Field’s film “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as an orchestra conductor named Lydia Tár, both men are mentioned, by an elderly male retired conductor, as objects of his sympathy. This peripheral character’s remark should hardly be taken for the writer and director’s point of view—except that the drama is centered on accusations of improprieties levied against Lydia and presents her as a victim. The movie scoots rapidly by the accusations that she faces; it blurs the details, eliminates the narratives, merely sketches hearings, leaves crucial events offscreen, and offers a calculated measure of doubt, in order to present her accusers as unhinged and hysterical and the protesters gathered against her as frantic and goofy. Moreover, it depicts her as the victim of another attack, one that is based on blatant falsehoods, but that, in the wake of the other accusations, gains traction in the media.

“Tár” is a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics. It presents Lydia as an artist who fails to separate her private life from her professional one, who allows her sexual desires and personal relationships to influence her artistic judgment—which is, in turn, confirmed and even improved under that influence. It presents the efforts to expand the world of classical music to become more inclusive, by way of commissioning and presenting new music by a wider range of composers, as somewhere between a self-sacrificing gesture of charity and utterly pointless. It mocks the concept of the blind audition (intended to prevent gatekeeping conductors, musicians, and administrators from making decisions on the basis of appearance). It sneers at the presumption of an orchestra to self-govern (which the one that Lydia unmistakably conducts in the film, the Berlin Philharmonic, does in real life). It derisively portrays a young American conducting student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who identifies “as a BIPOC pangender person,” and who says that he can’t take Bach seriously because he was a misogynist. The film looks at any social station and way of life besides the money-padded and the pristinely luxurious as cruddy, filthy, pathetic.

Lydia’s backstory—of a sanitized, résumé-like sort—is dispensed in the movie’s first long scene, a New Yorker -centric one, featuring my colleague Adam Gopnik, as himself, interviewing Lydia onstage for The New Yorker Festival. He introduces her by way of a litany of her achievements: conducting posts with the great orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York, a background in ethnomusicology and the music of Indigenous peoples, a repertory that involves commissioning music from female composers and performing it alongside venerable classical works, even an EGOT . As Gopnik recites her bona fides, her assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who obviously compiled them, silently lip-synchs along offstage.

Lydia is married to Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), the orchestra’s concertmaster, a relationship that began around the time of Lydia’s appointment to the group’s leadership. They live, with their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), in a Brutalist apartment of a pristine monumentality (though Lydia keeps her old place, in an old building, to work in). Lydia is the co-founder of a program to mentor aspiring young female conductors. Francesca, one of her former students, works tirelessly as Lydia’s factotum, amanuensis, and personal assistant, in the expectation of becoming her assistant conductor in Berlin. Another former student, Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote), is seemingly stalking Lydia, who has meanwhile been thwarting Krista’s career by dissuading orchestra administrators from hiring her. There’s the hint that Lydia had had sexual relationships with both Francesca and Krista—but only a hint, and enough calculated vagueness to leave viewers debating in the lobby.

“Tár” is a useful reminder of the connection between regressive ideas and regressive aesthetics. It’s also a useful illustration of the fact that there is no such thing as “the story,” no preëxisting set of events that inherently define a character’s life, rise, or fall. This movie, launching the action with the barest of hints that Krista is the bringer of trouble to paradise, does almost as good a job at effacing the specifics of whatever may have gone on between them as Lydia herself does of deleting Krista’s incriminating e-mails. (One hint of the nature of their relationship is an anonymous gift—a signed copy of Vita Sackville-West’s novel “Challenge,” based on the author’s romantic relationship with a woman who attempts to die by suicide—that Lydia tears and discards.)

The movie takes the point of view of Lydia throughout. She has lived for so long in the world of private jets and private foundations that anything else seems like a dreadful comedown. It identifies so closely with her perspective that it even depicts several of her dreams—yet, despite getting inside her head, Field can’t be bothered to show what she knows of her relationships with two of the key characters in the film; he doesn’t convey what Lydia knows of her ostensible misdeeds, whether with flashbacks, internal monologues, or the details of investigations. The film seems to want it both ways: it sustains Lydia’s perspective regarding music, her professional relationships, and her daily aesthetic, while carefully cultivating ambiguity regarding what Lydia is charged with, in order to wag a finger at characters who rush to judgment on the basis of what’s shown (or, what isn’t). By eliminating the accusations, Field shows which narrative he finds significant enough to put onscreen. By filtering Lydia’s cinematic subjectivity to include disturbing dreams but not disturbing memories, he shows what aspect of her character truly interests him. By allowing her past to be defined by her résumé, he shows that he, too, is wowed by it and has little interest in seeing past it.

This movie about an artist’s life and work is, for the most part, utterly unilluminating about the music on which it’s centered. It delivers a few superficial details regarding Lydia’s effort to interpret the piece at the core of the film, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, in terms of the composer’s biography. As for new music, Lydia may commission it and conduct it, she may exhort Max to discover the feelings in it, but the movie never shows what Lydia herself does with it or finds in it. The best moments in the film are the few, of a quasi-documentary import, in which Lydia, in rehearsal with the orchestra, exhorts and directs the musicians in fine points of phrasing and other expressive details.

Yet the music itself is filmed with an absence of style. Not a single image of the orchestra at work has a visual melody or a contrapuntal density, and the filming of performance seems borrowed from any DVD of a symphony orchestra. (By contrast, see Edgar Ulmer’s filming of the real-life conductor Leopold Stokowski and the musicians of his orchestra in the 1947 film “ Carnegie Hall .”) The conducting gestures that Lydia makes, her expressions while conducting, are laughable, not because Blanchett’s performance is in any way ridiculous but because Field’s awkward, lumpish images make it appear so. In a climactic scene, in which Lydia gives vent to her largely stifled rage against her perceived persecution, she emerges from the wings of the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert hall to the sound of the opening trumpet call of Mahler’s Fifth, which Field turns into the equivalent of a baseball player’s walk-on music .

The movie is no less obtuse regarding the artistic side of the power plays and the personal relationships that go into the making of music. A young cellist, Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), whom Lydia chooses on the basis of attraction to her, in stealthy defiance of the blind audition, turns out to be a gifted musician whose particular talents Lydia pushes to the fore (with a planned performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto). Far from alienating the somewhat bewildered orchestra, Olga soon wins their admiration. Moreover, the prime beneficiary of the accusations against Lydia (significantly, relegated to the gossipy New York Post ) is a conductor of lesser talent, a boardroom-friendly art bureaucrat (and a funder of her mentorship program), Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong). The one moving aspect of the offstage lives of musicians involves the fear of exposure that queer musicians endured, the deformation of their private lives by the pressure to maintain secrecy, and Lydia’s confession about the career-threatening troubles that she and Sharon endured when they made their relationship public. Yet, at the same time, Field has the chutzpah to liken today’s #MeToo era—in which, one character claims, to be accused is to be considered guilty—to the supposed excesses and false accusations of Germany’s postwar period of de-Nazification.

The careful ambiguities of “Tár” offer a sort of plausible deniability to its relentlessly conservative button-pushing, and its aesthetic is no less regressive, conservative, and narrow. The film is constructed as a series of scenes that cut from one place to another, even jumping ahead just a few minutes or hours, and the characterization of Lydia Tár is similarly disjointed. Blanchett’s performance doesn’t suffice: she incarnates each moment sharply and emphatically but, despite her supremely skillful exertions, Field doesn’t forge dramatic unity. The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all. “Tár” digests great art, and high-flown talk about it, into a smooth and superficial package. It’s as far from the great art of movies as most movie scores are from a Mahler symphony. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

First she scandalized Washington. Then she became a princess .

What exactly happened between Neanderthals and humans ?

The unravelling of an expert on serial killers .

When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing wasp mummies, too .

The meanings of the Muslim head scarf .

The slippery scams of the olive-oil industry .

Critics on the classics: our 1991 review of “Thelma & Louise.”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Jessica Winter

By Helen Shaw

By Alex Ross

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Longtime new york times film critic a.o. scott moving to book review after the oscars.

The critic has reviewed more than 2,200 films for the newspaper over the last 23 years.

By Alex Weprin

Alex Weprin

Media & Business Writer

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

The New York Times ‘ film critic A.O. Scott is moving to a new beat.

Scott, who has reviewed more than 2,200 films for the Times over the last 23 years, will shift to The New York Times Book Review where he will “write critical essays, notebooks and reviews that grapple with literature, ideas and intellectual life,” according to a memo to Times staff from Sam Sifton, Gilbert Cruz and Sia Michel Tuesday.

Related Stories

N.y. times says it was "incorrect" to rely on hamas claims to wrongly blame israel for gaza hospital blast, anthony pellicano doc reporters on why the notorious pi matters today: "is hollywood still above the law".

Scott will leave the culture section for the Book Review in March, after the Oscars and 2023 film awards season.

Scott joined the Times as a film critic in 2000 from Long Island’s Newsday and was elevated to co-chief film critic in 2004, alongside Manohla Dargis, who remains the chief film critic for the paper of record. A Times spokesperson said that the outlet will be hiring another film critic.

With its international profile and large cosmopolitan readership, being a critic for the Times (be it in books, film, TV, architecture, restaurants, etc) means that everything you write will be thoroughly scrutinized. That was true for Scott as well, whose 2012 dustup with Samuel L. Jackson over a review of Marvel’s The Avengers garnered substantial media coverage ( including from The Hollywood Reporter ).

The memo from Sifton, Michel and Cruz is below.

On January 1, 2000, A.O. Scott joined The Times as a film critic, after working as a Sunday book critic at New York Newsday. Eleven days later, we published his first review, of the comedy “My Dog Skip”: “a relaxed, modest evocation of the mythology of small-town mid-20th-century American childhood, with its lazy summers, its front porches and picket fences, and its fat-tired, chromed-plated bicycles.” Four years later, he was named co-chief film critic, alongside Manohla Dargis.

In many ways this is a natural progression. Tony was a literature concentrator at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1987, and is a graduate-school dropout in American literature (Johns Hopkins: thank you, next!). He started his journalism career as an assistant to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books and was soon contributing reviews there, as well as to Slate and, of course, to Newsday.

A deep and abiding interest in books and ideas has been clear in Tony’s work here from the start. “It’s the job of art to free our minds,” he wrote in his 2016 book, “Better Living Through Criticism,” “and it’s the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom.” And anyone who read his towering series about American novelists for the Book Review a few years ago, “The Americans,” can see in his work a desire to take measure of more than simply a cultural product, but of the culture itself.

Please join us in congratulating Tony on starting this exciting new chapter in his remarkable career.

Sam, Gilbert and Sia

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘rebel nun’ review: sister helen prejean, the activist who inspired ‘dead man walking,’ gets a lackluster doc portrait, alan scarfe, ‘double impact’ and ‘seven days’ actor, dies at 77, george clooney called white house to defend wife helping bring war crimes case against israeli leaders (report), ‘wallace & gromit’ film gets title, christmas release as iconic villain feathers mcgraw seeks revenge, netflix shows off massive “no guardrails” animation slate with ‘terminator,’ zack snyder’s ‘twilight of the gods’, bentonville film festival sets lineup for ‘geena & friends’ event, unveils additional programming.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Hit Man Link to Hit Man
• Am I OK? Link to Am I OK?
• Jim Henson Idea Man Link to Jim Henson Idea Man

New TV Tonight

• Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• Ren Faire: Season 1
• Sweet Tooth: Season 3
• Clipped: Season 1
• Queenie: Season 1
• Mayor of Kingstown: Season 3
• Becoming Karl Lagerfeld: Season 1
• Criminal Minds: Season 17
• Power Book II: Ghost: Season 4
• Erased: WW2's Heroes of Color: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• Eric: Season 1
• Dark Matter: Season 1
• Tires: Season 1
• Evil: Season 4
• Star Wars: Ahsoka: Season 1
• Trying: Season 4
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1 Link to Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

The Bad Boys Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

All 73 Disney Animated Movies Ranked

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Vote For the Best Movie of 1999 – Round 4

House of the Dragon : Season 2 First Reviews: Gorgeous and Expertly Crafted, with Epic Dragon Fights

• Trending on RT
• The Acolyte First Reviews
• Vote: 1999 Movie Showdown
• The Watchers

New York Times

Tomatometer-approved publication.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, challengers.

Now streaming on:

Luca Guadagnino directs “Challengers,” a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley. There’s even part of one match done from the point-of-view of a ball being smacked to-and-fro at high speed. It’s extravagantly goofy. But it’s also hilarious and wonderful, because it’s an objective correlative for how far the film will go to entertain you. 

Zendaya stars as Tashi, a former teenage tennis pro in the mold of one of the Williams sisters whose career on the court is ended by an injury and pivots to being a manager. Her only client is her husband Art ( Mike Faist , who played Riff in “West Side Story”). Art is a nice guy who’s been a dominant force in men’s tennis thanks in large part to Tashi’s guidance and loyalty. Art is having an existential crisis when the story begins. Tashi gets the bright idea of having him enter a low-level championship match in hopes that he’ll reconnect with the energy that fueled him when she met him. 

But there’s a secret agenda here, one whose motivations and machinations we’re never entirely privy to: one of the players expected to appear at the match is Patrick (Josh O’Connor), a scruffy hustler who used to be best friends with Art until Tashi came between them. Like, literally came between them: one of many dazzling non-tennis showpieces in “Challengers” is a lengthy flashback scene wherein Tashi visits the motel room that the two guys are sharing during a tournament, slinks onto the bed with them, and makes out with both men simultaneously, until the point where Art and Patrick, who are so close and physically comfortable with each other that they could be mistaken for lovers anyway, start making out with each other, and Tashi coolly withdraws from the tangle of bodies and watches what she’s delighted to realize is her own handiwork. 

What, exactly, drives Tashi? The movie lets us poke around the edges of her psychology but prevents us from getting enough of a glimpse at her emotional interior to draw solid inferences. What drives Patrick, who realizes early into the Art-finds-his-roots tournament that Tashi is there for him as well, and that there’s still powerful sexual energy between them, way more electric and obvious than what flows between Tashi and Art? We don’t quite know. Their connection is more feral than intellectual. What drives Art? Goodness, mostly. He’s a smart, decent guy. You instinctively understand that he’s quite aware there’s still some unspoken thing happening between Tashi and Patrick. But he has decided to be grateful to have been the official “winner” of this relationship tournament, and seems to believe that the best strategy is to let things play out while trusting in his wife’s love and loyalty. 

What a situation! The instability of it keeps “Challengers” on its toes even when it’s on the verge of getting tripped up by plot machinations and the past/present storytelling churn of Justin Kuritzkes ’ screenplay and Marco Costa ’s editing. There’s a lively cinematic subgenre that deconstructs the rise and fall of a relationship by jumping around in time—two excellent examples are “ Blue Valentine ” and “ Two for the Road ”—and this movie carries on that tradition with panache, and adds many spectacularly blocked, framed, and edited scenes of athletic competition that, taken together, feel like a tennis fan’s answer to a boxing picture. ( Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor's score is insistent and relentless and loud, the techno-inflected answer to a full studio orchestra score in an old Hollywood melodrama.)

Is "Challengers" too ambitious for its own good? Or too much? Or less than meets the eye, as the late, great Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris might have put it? Probably. It kinda gets sucked into the vortex of its own narrative and technical ambitions in the final stretch. And there might be a too many clever transitions from one time period to the other, sometimes at moments when what’s onscreen is so engrossing that you’d rather the film continue immersing itself rather than cutting away to chase some other thing. And the 1970s American New Wave “What just happened and what does it mean?” ending feels unearned. It’s not so much pretentious as out-of-nowhere and feels not-right for what preceded it. 

The pleasures of “Challengers” are visceral, intuitive, at times animalistic. Despite the intricate structure, there’s nothing about it that announces, “I am an art film, and I will take you into the hidden recesses of the human heart and mind and leave you there to ponder the complexities of what you’ve just seen.” The tone is more like those great entertainments that starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall from the 1940s, where every line seemed dirty because of how the actors said it. 

Which is to say that the film is more Hollywood than Cannes—and not only is that perfectly fine, it’s exciting. Commercial cinema is terrified of sex these days, and adult sexuality, and adulthood generally. Anything over a certain budget level seems to neuter itself by repeatedly worrying throughout the production process whether what’s happening on the screen might potentially cause even mild discomfort in a family with young children, or between an older parent and the adult child who lives with them and has to sit beside them on the couch while watching TV. It’s a shame how the phrase “adult movie” has become associated almost exclusively with erotica/pornography, because it also describes the kind of work that concerns itself with matters that children cannot understand because they’re children. 

All three lead actors carry themselves like movie stars. Guadagnino and his game-for-anything cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who shot two other Guadagnino films as well as several by Apichatpong Weerasethakul ) shoot the performers as if they’re legends of both the court and the big screen that they're very lucky to have in the cast. It’s a treat to see three young, contemporary actors nailing the  understated flirty gravitas that the stars of films for grownups used to exhibit in earlier eras, but that almost nobody knows how to do at this comparatively sexless moment in 21st century cinema. 

Zendaya has that knowing, alpha-queen, insinuating blank-slate quality that emanated from Julia Roberts in many of her 1990s and early aughts roles. She carries herself like a young woman who has every right to be where she is. That feeling meshes perfectly with Tashi, who remains formidable even after a stroke of bad luck takes professional tennis away from her as a sport and leaves her as a business-and-media puppet master. Faist nails the difficult role of the nice guy who is strong and loyal but might not be tough enough to withstand the wringer that the other two characters seem like they’re about to put him through. O’Connor’s slightly-open-mouthed performance, dark-features, unshaven and sweaty presentation, and wrinkled and stained clothes turn him into the 21st century answer to a 1970s movie star like Elliott Gould or Donald Sutherland : somebody with a smirking countercultural edge. He's got a dangerously unstable yet attractive quality that's perfect for this film.

The perspective on the main characters is outside looking in. Even when the camerawork and editing dice up the story and rearrange meanings and facts, you’re never being allowed access to the main players’ minds or hearts. It’s not that kind of movie. You watch it like you watch the U.S. Open. Power dynamics are everything. Who’s up? Who’s down? Is there a potential for a comeback? It’s a great sports film because it shows you how what happens in the arena is a stylized and distilled mirror of what’s happening elsewhere in the players’ lives. There are several moments in the movie where one of the central trio faces another on the court and we draw in our breath because we know one of them has a secret advantage over the other—a trump card that they’ve been carrying around for a while, and are finally ready to play.

This movie doesn’t have a philosophical or understated moment anywhere in its running time, and seems not to care whether you think that’s a flaw, because it’s “in the zone” in the way that a professional athlete is. It doesn’t just want to entertain. It wants to win . 

Opens in theaters on April 26th.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

Now playing

You Can't Run Forever

Brian tallerico.

Art College 1994

Simon abrams.

Young Woman and the Sea

Christy lemire.

Sheila O'Malley

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

Marya e. gates, film credits.

Challengers (2024)

131 minutes

Zendaya as Tashi Duncan

Mike Faist as Art Donaldson

Josh O'Connor as Patrick Zweig

Darnell Appling as Umpire (New Rochelle Final)

Bryan Doo as Art's Physiotherapist

Shane T Harris as Art's Security Guard

Nada Despotovich as Tashi's Mother

• Luca Guadagnino
• Justin Kuritzkes

Latest blog posts

Handmade Magic: Jason and the Argonauts

House of the Dragon Returns with a Captivating Yet Convoluted Second Season

Hulu's Queenie is a Masterful Study of Self-Growth

Fear, Hope, and Joy: Ramata-Toulaye Sy on Banel and Adama

‘The Commandant's Shadow' Review: A Chilling Documentary Postscript to ‘The Zone of Interest' that Centers on Rudolf Höss' Children

A scattershot but compelling postscript to " The Zone of Interest, " and the film that is guaranteed to start auto-playing every time someone watches that Oscar-winning masterpiece on Max, "The Commandant's Shadow" similarly examines the moral dissociation that made Auschwitz possible - but where Jonathan Glazer's anti-drama framed the Final Solution as a nine-to-five job, Daniela Völker's documentary instead positions that atrocity as an inheritance. Rudolf Höss' brood of blond little sons and daughters had no way of knowing - or at least no way of understanding - that their father was overseeing the greatest slaughter our species has ever suffered, but the unfathomable reality of the situation naturally began to reveal itself to them as they came of age during the Nuremberg Trials and learned that Auschwitz wasn't synonymous with "childhood idyll" for the rest of the world. Did the Camp Commandant's children - and their children's children - struggle with the crushing weight of Höss' crimes against humanity, or could they only hope to function by continuing the family tradition of willful ignorance and epitomizing history's suicidal eagerness to forget itself? 

Despite being shot well before the events of October 7 (as you can tell by a queasily naive mid-credits scene that teases the state of Israel as if it might be the answer to genocide, as opposed to a tool for perpetuating it), "The Commandant's Shadow" implicitly recognizes that "never again" can't be taken for granted. Völker and her subjects alike both share the fortitude to recognize those words as a call to action rather than a simple promise, even if this film's unhelpful emphasis on archival material stops it from appreciating how that slogan might be weaponized into its own form of forgetting. 

The brunt of this documentary is focused on Hans Jürgen Hoss, the fourth of the Commandant's five children - 87 years old at the time of filming. Hans was born in Dachau in 1937, and moved to the house next door to Auschwitz when he was three (his photos from the time are indistinguishable from "The Zone of Interest," and a jaw-dropping testament to the uncanny precision of Glazer's film). To this day, Hans doesn't seem to appreciate the cognitive dissonance he causes by waxing nostalgic about his childhood years; it's strange enough to hear someone say "I had a really lovely childhood in Auschwitz," but the blitheness in his voice is even more jarring than the sentiment it's used to express.

The passages in which Hans reflects upon growing up at the gates of hell are ghastly and compelling in equal measure, as Völker pushes her subject to remember the specifics of his experience. Hans insists that he and his siblings believed their dad was just a prison warden like any other - and really, what kid that age fully understands what their parents do for work? He could see the crematorium from his bedroom window (a detail that Glazer's film mercifully denied the Höss children), but swears that he was oblivious to the horrors being enacted inside its walls. It doesn't matter if you believe him or not. It should go without saying that "The Commandant's Shadow" is less interested in prosecuting an old man for what he knew as a child than it is in questioning an old man about what he did with that knowledge as an adult, and the one true masterstroke of Völker's film is that it casts Hans' own son Kai as his most skeptical interrogator. 

A fifty-something pastor whose familial guilt led him towards a life of religious expiation, Kai Höss is close enough to his father to love him, but distanced enough from his grandfather to appreciate the full depravity of his deeds. Hans is all too happy to reflect upon his memories, which are still filtered through his perspective as a child, and distressingly effervescent as a result (he's almost smiling as he recounts the day when English soldiers breached the Zone of Interest and apprehended his young siblings at gunpoint, as if it were like a scene from a young boy's wargame come to life). Kai is a necessary corrective to such rose-colored remembrances. 

For the most part, the pushback Hans' son provides is offered directly to the camera in a series of 1:1 talking head interviews, as Kai casts doubt on his father's lack of awareness, and suggests that Hans has lived in the grip of his own subconscious denial since the day he was born. The film's most probing and insightful moments find Kai challenging his father's relationship to the past - gently, but with the determination of someone trying to scrub a stain out of a human soul. When Hans says that he only recently learned of the memoir that Rudolf wrote while on trial for the murder of several million Jews, Kai reminds him that they had a copy of it in their home when he was growing up. Kai also shades the book as a self-exculpatory work of image-polishing, authored with a clinical detachment that Rudolf hoped would recast him as an agent of death rather than its chief perpetrator. 

This documentary lends credence to that suspicion by reading several excerpts from the book over corresponding footage from the Holocaust, and while it's understandable why Völker would feel compelled to stipulate the same atrocities that "The Zone of Interest" flattened into abstraction, doing so at such length only distracts from the essence of what this film is about: Not the hard facts of a genocide, but the soft truths of how that genocide shaped the generations that emerged from its shadow. 

To that point, "The Commandant's Shadow" introduces another pair of characters whose relationship was forged by the Final Solution: Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was spared because of her role in the concentration camp's orchestra, and her daughter Maya, who was raised with - and continues to suffer from - the residual trauma she inherited from her mom. These women allow the victims of the Holocaust to have a voice in Völker's film, even though the director is reluctant to detail the rift between them (beyond Anita's heartbreaking admission that she's "the wrong mother for my daughter"), and even more hesitant about drawing any parallels between Maya and Kai's respective experiences as second-generation byproducts of the Shoah. Each of them in their own way is fighting to reclaim a part of themselves that was stolen from them before they were born, but this documentary is so glibly determined to confront their parents with the past that it does a massive disservice to the more urgent matter of how that past might survive in the present.

Meaningful as it is to bring Hans back to Auschwitz and force him to stand in front of the gallows where his father was hanged, it's hard to find much value in the wisdom that such a conceit is able to wring from an old man who will never be able to make peace with his lineage. "I don't think we've learned from the Holocaust," Hans says. "Otherwise there wouldn't be antisemitism again like there is now." But such climactic bromides, however sincere they may be, are much less illuminating than even the briefest scenes in which this film dares to explore the dark crevices of Hans' own education on the subject, and how the gaps in his willingness to understand those lessons have shaped his memory of his father and/or his relationship with his son. 

"The Commandant's Shadow" threatens to shine a light into that strange abyss during the remarkable sequence in which Hans visits his long-estranged sister, a cancer-stricken former model who's denied herself any trace of second-hand culpability, but Völker would rather make vague gestures towards reconciliation with orchestral music and soaring drone shots than risk getting lost inside the labyrinth of the human soul. In that light, it's no surprise that the least effective scene in the entire film is the grand finale where Hans and Anita are brought face-to-face, the walls of Auschwitz no longer standing between them. 

Völker knows better than to frame this bittersweet meeting as a meaningful rebuke to the horrors of our history, but she isn't sure what else to do with the lack of emotionality the scene produces from its participants - especially Anita, who almost seems to shrug the whole thing off. "The Commandant's Shadow" hopes that it can contrive a way to console its subjects for their psychic wounds, or at least encourage them to see their foundational trauma in a new light. Regrettably, "never again" proves to be a misguided ethos for a film about pain that's so nakedly unresolved, both in its characters, and in a world that has learned nothing from the lessons they were born to teach it.

"The Commandant's Shadow" will screen in theaters nationwide on Wednesday, May 29 and Thursday, May 30. It will be available to stream on Max later this year.

More from IndieWire

• Bill Skarsgård: Warner Bros. Was 'Kind of Mean' About 'It' Marketing
• Mike Flanagan Will Direct 'Radical New Take' on 'The Exorcist' Franchise That Won't Be a 'Believer' Sequel