Movie review by Greg Carlson

Originally conceived by writer-director Christy Hall as a stage play, the movie “Daddio” premiered in September of 2023 at the Telluride Film Festival. Featuring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn as the only two significant characters with spoken dialogue in a credited cast of four (a curbside valet connects rider to car and we briefly glimpse a little girl in an adjacent vehicle), the story traces a late-night, near real-time journey from JFK to a destination in midtown Manhattan. Client and chauffeur have never met before – but an intimate connection will be forged. Playwright Hall, making her feature directorial debut, gets the most mileage (pun intended) from the two magnetic stars, who are called upon to use pauses, looks, and silences to add layers of meaning beyond the words they say to one another.

Many memorable films have relied on the cab as a setting to convey intense drama. Terry Malloy’s reckoning with his brother Charley the Gent in “On the Waterfront” is more than just a contender for top honors, but Travis Bickle’s odyssey as God’s Lonely Man in “Taxi Driver” might split the arrow in the “Waterfront” bullseye. Later, Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi dazzled critics with separate, Tehran-based docufictions that would lead, in the case of the former, to charges of abuse and intellectual property theft brought against the director by performers/artists Mania Akbari and Amina Maher.

“Daddio” never approaches the next-level transcendence of these examples, but Hall’s ambitious attempt to electrify the intimate communication of people confined to the seats of driver and passenger is, for the most part, less claustrophobic and static than the single location would at first suggest. Hall conducted principal photography in only 16 days on a soundstage using the on-set virtual production model called the “Volume,” the technology that integrates high-definition LED panels to display fully immersive backgrounds. Used extensively in “The Mandalorian,” the system’s application in the production of “Daddio” is, according to “Collider,” its first execution in a “grounded drama.”

While Hall has insisted that the amateur shrink portrayed by Penn represents an authentic type of NYC driver for hire, the audience is required to suspend disbelief that a much younger woman passenger would allow a total stranger to engage in all kinds of deeply intimate and sexually charged talk requiring highly personal revelations and borderline invasive disclosures. In this sense, “Daddio” cannot entirely escape comparison to aspects of the HBO series “Taxicab Confessions,” particularly in regard to back-and-forth texting/sexting between Johnson’s “Girlie” and the older married man with whom she is romantically involved.

Hall carves out enough space for the viewer to recognize the triple reflection suggested by the title; Johnson’s character projects an acute awareness of the unhealthy relationship markers commonly affiliated with the pop psychology of so-called “daddy issues.” Our cabbie instantly sniffs out the marital status of Girlie’s mature lover. Penn’s often vulgar and chauvinistic pronouncements might inspire less self-possessed travelers to change drivers (or maybe even file sexual harassment complaints). By the end of this particular journey, however, Johnson has opened up to her confessor with a vulnerability that suggests a desire for the kind of father-daughter relationship she never thought possible.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

German filmmaker Julia von Heinz aims for the poignant and the sincere in “Treasure,” starring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry as daughter and father travelers coming to grips with the terrible past and their strained relationship. Based on Australian writer Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical novel “Too Many Men,” the adaptation has, in no small measure due to its blend of the tragic and the comic, divided viewers and critics. Set at the beginning of the 1990s, the story unfolds primarily as a reluctant road trip, as Dunham’s dour, divorced journalist Ruth Rothwax coaxes papa Edek to trace the steps he and his family members took to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Von Heinz favors character over plot. Much of “Treasure” fleshes out the stark contrasts between the introverted Ruth and the more gregarious Edek. Fry’s largely credible Polish-accented English, interspersed with dialogue conducted in Edek’s native tongue, works as a reminder to the viewer and to Ruth that her inability to understand any Polish alienates her from a great deal of the spoken communication for which Edek and others must serve as translators. One of Ruth’s principal goals is to learn about her family’s past. She does not initially realize the extent to which Edek might prefer to avoid stirring up such painful memories.

At one point, the movie – which von Heinz co-wrote with John Quester, her spouse – was going to be called “Iron Box,” but the much broader “Treasure” carries with it multiple meanings. The most obvious of these interpretations is the metaphor for the work-in-progress connection between parent and child, a suggestion, affirmed in the last act, that no physical object or monetary wealth can compete with the riches of family love. Obviously, the title also refers to things left behind when Edek and his family were forced from their home by the Nazis. Ruth is willing to overpay for the teapot, overcoat, and silver bowl that remained in the vacated rooms.

It is certainly something of a coincidence that von Heinz’s movie arrives in theaters just before Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain.” Eisenberg’s second feature premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and shares with “Treasure” the tragicomic balancing act of an emotionally mismatched pair of relatives traveling to Poland and reckoning with the impact of the Holocaust on family survivors. Both movies respectfully take on the heaviness of scenes that unfold at concentration camp memorial sites. Both movies include the stark contrast of interpersonal opposition: one in the role of the gregarious charmer and the other a rigid, tightly-wound worrier. Both films also feature scenes featuring current occupants of a one-time residence.

“Treasure,” however, drills down on the latter of those parallels, fashioning its big reveal around one more iteration of the film’s title. It is also much more austere than “A Real Pain,” in which writer-director-performer Eisenberg handles the dangerous and delicate matter of braiding humor and discomfort more adroitly than von Heinz manages in the steel-gray “Treasure.” While I would not go as far as Leslie Helperin, who calls “Treasure” a “an inept, ill-made mess … muddled and misbegotten,” the movie most certainly could have used a slightly sharper pair of scissors to trim the 112-minute running time and step up the pacing.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Daina Pusić’s feature narrative debut “Tuesday” premiered at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival last September. A joint production of A24, BBC Film and the British Film Institute, the movie stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Lola Petticrew as mother and child on a journey toward the death of the latter from a terminal illness. In an unorthodox bit of character design, the principal performers are joined by the manifestation of Death as a CGI-enhanced macaw voiced with a gravelly rasp by the Nigerian-born, London-based actor and playwright Arinzé Kene. This curious story element should draw at least a few adventuresome viewers looking for an offbeat alternative to big budget summer fare.

Pusić, working from her own original script, makes several imaginative and exciting narrative choices to work terrain that dates to the earliest theatrical drama performed on the stages of ancient Greece. Grappling with some of the most basic philosophical questions, from the meaning and/or meaninglessness of life to the existence and/or non-existence of an all-powerful creator, the filmmaker ambitiously reckons with several of the toughest dimensions accompanying grief and the process of letting go. Common wisdom says that children should bury their parents and not the other way around; Pusić leans heavily on Louis-Dreyfus to convey the emotional chaos that accompanies the guilt and despair of such an awful situation.

At 111 minutes, “Tuesday” labors to successfully sustain its length. Despite the fleeting presence of a few folks briefly on hand to illustrate the overwhelming and exhausting job requirements of Death (who at one point unburdens himself regarding the taxing workload and the cacophony of voices that fill his head), the only really significant person outside the primary trio is the home health/hospice nurse played by Leah Harvey. A source of potential viewer frustration, Pusić deliberately withholds any back stories, side stories, or, for that matter, any sort of material that would expand and deepen the characters.

The filmmaker’s choices aren’t entirely devoid of charm, however. After bargaining with Death for a little more time, the title fifteen-year-old deconstructs the bittersweet message in Ice Cube’s melancholic masterpiece “It Was a Good Day,” discovering that the Grim Reaper is a fellow hip-hop fan. The bird, who can grow to enormous size or shrink small enough to perch inside Tuesday’s ear, inspires many questions ultimately left unanswered. In one extended sequence that echoes the premise of Piers Anthony’s 1983 novel “On a Pale Horse,” mother Zora, with Tuesday strapped to her back, temporarily takes on Death’s occupational responsibilities.

Pusić never quite brings all of the disparate components together in a satisfying manner; we are bounced between the reconciliation of the more concrete parent/child relationship and the fantasy abstractions represented by the supernatural parrot. Petticrew’s Tuesday – beautiful, calm, and dignified even as Zora fights to keep herself together – belongs to the cinematic tradition coined by Roger Ebert as Ali MacGraw’s Syndrome/Disease: “the medical condition in which you grow more and more beautiful until you die.” Add “Tuesday” to the group containing “Love Story,” “Restless,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” and countless others.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In their previous feature, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival Next selection “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” director Jane Schoenbrun shaped the raw materials of electronically-mediated internet communication to explore thresholds, boundaries, and the construction of identities. “I Saw the TV Glow,” while no less raw and unsettling, marks a significant step in the filmmaker’s evolution, shifting from the more directly participatory and interactive dynamics of the creepypasta-influenced “World’s Fair Challenge” to the obsessive cult fandom inspired by television shows such as “Twin Peaks” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” An ambitious and thoughtful experience driven by two strong central performances, “I Saw the TV Glow” is adventurous and thought-provoking cinema.

While accompanying his mother to the polls for the 1996 presidential election, Owen (played briefly as a middle-schooler by Ian Foreman and then as an older teen and adult by Justice Smith) spots Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading a paperback episode guide to the late-night YA fantasy series “The Pink Opaque.” A strange tale of two girls with psychic abilities, the compelling serial features evil clowns, living ice cream treats, and monstrous characters like “big bad” Mr. Melancholy, whose looks are inspired by the lunar visage from “A Trip to the Moon” by way of the Smashing Pumpkins. Although he has not yet been able to watch (“The Pink Opaque” airs after his bedtime), Owen cooks up a plan to join Maddy for weekend screenings. Maddy also obsessively tapes the show on VHS.

The rituals of devotion practiced by Owen and Maddy will be familiar to viewers who treated (and continue to treat) “Twin Peaks” like the foundational scripture of a deeply-felt religious denomination. Schoenbrun uses the show-within-the-show to reflect and refract the experiences of Owen and Maddy in a manner reminiscent of how the soap opera “Invitation to Love” fueled the imaginations of characters appearing in “Twin Peaks” and functioned as a commentary on the principal melodrama. In another of the movie’s homages to the imagination of David Lynch, live musical performances take place at a spot called the Double Lunch in parallel to the showcases at the Bang Bang Bar/Roadhouse in “Twin Peaks.”

In the press notes for the film, Schoenbrun candidly discusses their intention for “I Saw the TV Glow” to address what is called the “egg crack” – “the pivotal moment when a person first realizes they are trans.” Multiple observers have praised Schoenbrun for the sophisticated depiction of such a complex experience; the intensely personal is rendered here with uniqueness and specificity for the characters while conveying something universal and human for all audience members. Schoenbrun chooses not to develop parasocial interactions and relationships between Owen and Maddy and the protagonists of “The Pink Opaque,” avoiding a pitfall that routinely trips up filmmakers who play with the show-within-the-show conceit.

The decision proves especially wise as one of the wonders of “I Saw the TV Glow” unfolds when memories of “The Pink Opaque” don’t align in the ways anticipated by Owen when he revisits the series as an older person. Schoenbrun even embraces the humor amidst this pain, inviting viewers to laugh at the revised glimpse of something that at one time was so whole and so meaningful. It is just one among many of the movie’s instances of dysphoric fracturing that accompanies what Schoenbrun notes is the desire to “figure out a way to be yourself in a world that has done a really good job of trying to convince you that you’re someone else.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A more than serviceable portrait of the beloved artist, “Jim Henson: Idea Man” debuts on Disney+ this weekend. As organized by director Ron Howard, the documentary presents a primarily chronological overview of career highlights mixed with behind-the-scenes considerations of children and marriage. While the latter component is sanitized – predictably, given the full participation and cooperation of the Henson family – Howard circles the frustrations and challenges experienced by Jane Nebel with care and sensitivity. Naturally, the most devoted fans will come in with higher expectations than the casual viewer. All, however, will thrill to Howard’s skillful assemblage of colorful and wondrous archival footage, some of it never previously shared.

In the spirit of Henson’s boundless energy and devotion to the experimental, Howard incorporates transitional and interstitial animations that evoke the vibe of shorts like the Oscar-nominated “Time Piece,” itself briefly excerpted and addressed. Newly collected on-camera interviews with Henson’s surviving children – son John died in 2014 – and a select group of key collaborators split some of the remaining space with all kinds of clips and television appearances that allow Henson to speak for himself. A certain highlight/ringer among these vintage treats is the appearance of Henson and Frank Oz on the unsold pilot of “The Orson Welles Show,” which should be the subject of its very own documentary.

It’s no shock that Frank Oz is the best of the talking heads, which include Rita Moreno as the de facto representative of “The Muppet Show” celebrity guest stars and Jennifer Connelly speaking to Henson’s fantasy film era output. While Oz has previously spoken on the singular relationship he enjoyed with Henson, “Idea Man” reminds us that together, Henson and Oz formed one of the most sublime and glorious comedy duos in the history of the business. It is, needless to say, impossible to imagine a comprehensive assessment of Henson’s life without the participation of Oz. All of Oz’s anecdotes contribute to a richer understanding of the man he deferentially describes as his boss. A few bring tears to the eyes.

Howard makes some hard cuts to maintain the right balance of major milestones, leaps of faith, and creative and commercial risks/pay-offs. Following the origin story that sees the evolution of Kermit the Frog following his earliest incarnation on WRC-TV’s “Sam and Friends” in Washington D.C., the movie covers Henson’s contributions to “Sesame Street” with a sharp sense of context. Marilyn Agrelo’s 2021 documentary “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street,” based on the terrific book by Michael Davis, makes a fine companion for those who want more.

Interestingly, Henson’s massive capacity for busting personal boundaries and his desire to reinvent through the embrace of new technologies are arguably made most visible by Howard in the sections after the conclusion of “The Muppet Show” in 1981. Neither “The Dark Crystal” nor “Labyrinth” catapulted Henson into the same ether occupied by the most universally popular Muppets, but we are reminded of the key ways in which those movies influenced future artists. By the time Howard approaches the dreaded hour of Henson’s untimely death in 1990 at the age of 53, we are positively winded from the film’s dizzying sprint through a truly amazing body of work.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Ilana Glazer is the co-writer and co-star of director Pamela Adlon’s comedy “Babes,” an appealing if familiar buddy movie that builds around the ups and downs of an unexpected pregnancy. The busy Glazer, best known for “Broad City,” returns to the general thematic territory she explored in the 2021 horror film “False Positive” (for which she also served as performer and co-screenwriter), trading the dread – if not the anxiety – for laughs. Sticking to the common pegs of the “growing up is hard” track of the friendship roller coaster, “Babes” pairs Glazer with Michelle Buteau, whose own comic chops match those of her screen partner.

Adlon’s movie is an entertaining and occasionally insightful journey likely to resonate most with viewers who have been pregnant (although good old gross-out humor, truly universal, transcends age, class, and gender). The highly specific gags revolving around all manner of bodily functions and exaggerated emotions feel like the logical progression of contemporary hallmarks like “Bridesmaids,” which may not be the first of its kind, but certainly received a lot of attention for moving the needle. See also Bilge Ebiri’s 2011 “Vulture” round-up for a longer list and a reminder that Lucille Ball “turned her own pregnancy into a season-long plot point at a time when you couldn’t actually say ‘pregnant’ on TV.”

Glazer’s Eden and Buteau’s Dawn have been inseparable since childhood, but the seed of what is frequently called the “plot-mandated friendship failure” sprouts from what the less financially successful Eden sees as a genuine threat to her partnership with Dawn. The latter is a dentist with a husband (Hasan Minhaj) and two kids of her own. When Eden discovers that it is most certainly possible to become pregnant while menstruating, she chooses motherhood. And while there is nothing wrong with the shocking reason given for the disappearance of one-night-stand sperm provider Claude (Stephan James), it’s a little too convenient.

The stand-up, improv, and television bona fides of the film’s creative core expose assets as well as liabilities. “Babes” is episodic and small-screen friendly to the extent that, like Leah McKendrick’s “Scrambled,” it could occasionally be mistaken for what we would expect to binge as a season or partial season of a series. The jokes are plentiful, however, and Glazer and her writing collaborator Josh Rabinowitz make sure that even the supporting cast members get to share the wealth – John Carroll Lynch as Eden’s doctor and identical twin brothers Kenny and Keith Lucas as improbable STI-clinicians run off with their scenes.

Adlon does a credible job illustrating the multitude of ways in which Eden walks very close to the edge of taking her bestie for granted. Generic convention mandates that the BFFs will suffer at least a couple of small to medium disagreements before a significant falling-out threatens the union. In “Babes,” an extended “babymoon” getaway (with structural echoes of the Vegas hijinks in “Knocked Up”) exacerbates some of the tension in the relationship, but the eventual change of heart and joyful reconciliation buoy the fantasy that love will keep us together.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Horror fans who loved director Tomas Alfredson’s terrific 2008 adaptation of John Ajvide Lindkvist’s vampire novel “Let the Right One In” will find much to appreciate about “Handling the Undead.” Based on Lindkvist’s second book, Norwegian filmmaker Thea Hvistendahl’s movie reimagines the slow zombie premise with a seemingly contradictory blend of the elegant and the macabre. An instant classic right at home within the popular subgenre almost single-handedly established by George Romero in 1968, Hvistendahl’s debut feature suggests the work of a veteran visual storyteller with many years of experience behind the camera.

In “Night of the Living Dead,” the reanimation of corpses may or may not be the result of a space probe explosion directing radioactive waves of energy toward Earth. “Handling the Undead” establishes its own mythology via an equally inexplicable phenomenon: some kind of unusual surge of electrical power in Oslo returns the recently deceased to life. In both movies, the cause is unimportant, even inconsequential, compared to the immediate aftermath. In Romero’s film, the unstoppable onslaught of a horde of shambling ghouls fueled the nightmare. Hvistendahl contemplates the equally unsettling ways we might react if our dearest loved ones were resurrected.

Significant similarities between “Night of the Living Dead” and “Handling the Undead” are abundant, but the difference between the two tales might at first be characterized in part as a matter of the external (zombies attacking us) versus the internal (how we reconcile the impossibility of corporeal rebirth). Both movies inspire us to confront our fears about death’s unknowable features and apply some deep thinking to an aspect of existence most people avoid at all costs. Hvistendahl appreciates the power of silence. Key collaborator Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s cinematography complements the style with gorgeous lighting and austere compositions worthy of Henning Bendtsen’s images for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s thematically sympathetic “Ordet.”

Even though Renate Reinsve’s grieving mother Anna might be the first among equals in Hvistendahl’s ensemble, the surrounding actors are fully committed to the movie’s realistic and somber tone. Anders Danielsen Lie, Reinsve’s co-star in “The Worst Person in the World,” confronts disbelief when his spouse (Bahar Pars) begins to breathe again after being killed in a catastrophic car wreck. In a third thread, an elderly woman makes her way back home not long after her own funeral. Unexpectedly, Reinsve and Lie don’t share any scenes, but the commitment to keeping the three stories separate has the effect of compounding the escalating dread and despair.

In his indispensable 2008 study of “Night of the Living Dead,” Ben Hervey wrote that the film’s pleasures center on “destruction: of generic convention, taboo, people, property, the natural order and ‘normal’ life.” Hervey’s words remind us of another way that “Handling the Undead” owes a debt – like all zombie movies since – to the 1968 film. Hvistendahl’s movie dispenses with the exact same kind of grim delights embedded in “Night of the Living Dead,” but its focus on disruption and disorder, like its predecessor, is handled with the highest respect. Given the ongoing popularity of the zombie in film and television, anything that feels like a genuine innovation or new treatment seems rare indeed.

“Handling  the Undead” premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and will be released in select United States locations starting May 31.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Now available to stream following a quiet and disappointing North American theatrical release, filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera” should not be missed. Josh O’Connor, whose recent work for another Italian director in “Challengers” has been more widely seen, gives an equally compelling performance alongside a supporting cast worthy of Fellini. Expanding the remarkably personal storytelling developed since feature narrative debut “Heavenly Body” in 2011 – and perfected in 2018’s sublime “Happy as Lazzaro” – Rohrwacher stakes a serious claim as one of today’s most vital auteurs.

Set in the early 1980s in Riparbella, Tuscany, “La Chimera” begins with an enigmatic reverie on a train. O’Connor’s foreigner Arthur, having recently finished serving a short prison sentence for his part in a group of gravesite thieves (known as tombaroli) who loot Etruscan antiquities, drifts in and out of consciousness as he imagines the face of once-upon-a-time love Beniamina (Yile Vianello). More than a bit rough around the edges, Arthur’s somewhat soiled, cream-colored linen suit and slightly disreputable air (not to mention his pungent odor) call to mind the rakish Jean-Paul Belmondo of “Breathless” as he draws attention from curious fellow passengers.

Arthur accepts the warm hospitality offered by Beniamina’s mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini, a living reminder of Italian cinematic heritage), who holds court with her daughters and a curious caretaker/servant/student named, with symbolic gravitas, Italia (Carol Duarte) in a rapidly deteriorating villa. Far from the opulence of the well-kept mansion played by Northamptonshire’s Drayton House in Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn,” Flora’s once spectacular keep is closer in cinematic presence to London’s Debenham House as immortalized in Joseph Losey’s “Secret Ceremony.” In all three cases, each dwelling serves as a crucial nexus for our understanding of the story. Later, Rohrwacher will relocate her characters to an abandoned train station, underlining her point.

A walking contradiction, Arthur falls back in with the tombaroli even while he begins to develop romantic feelings for Italia. We learn that Arthur has previously studied archeology, although the filmmaker deliberately withholds any clues regarding her protagonist’s moral philosophy with regard to disturbing and profiting from necropolis treasures (beyond hints that the loss of Beniamina has caused a major change). Throughout “La Chimera,” Rohrwacher relies on the brilliant images collected by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, who mixes and matches a variety of film gauges and stocks to capture the shifting moods among the ruins.

It’s tempting and all too easy to thematically reduce “La Chimera” to a fable about the conflict between perceptions of a glorious, elusive past and the harsher realities of a more mundane and cruel present. Arthur’s gifts with a divining rod additionally situate him as a kind of oracular presence who can, in effect, magically sense the empty spaces beneath the earth. In the movie’s most breathtaking scene, the tombaroli locate a trove of artifacts, including a gorgeous statue of indescribable beauty, in an underground chamber. Exposed to moonlight and fresh air, the vivid colors of the long-untouched paintings fade instantly. The statue, and its eventual fate, rhymes with the absence of Beniamina. They are a pair of Eurydices to Arthur’s Orpheus.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The undeniable chemistry between stars Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling in David Leitch’s “The Fall Guy” is a significant selling point in what is surely one of the most heavily marketed movies of the year. A mashup of the rom-com and the action/crime thriller, Leitch’s latest is an inside-baseball wink and a frisky and frolicsome spree that gets a lot of mileage from its additional genre status as a movie-quoting Hollywood metanarrative. Loosely based on the 1981 to 1986 ABC series starring Lee Majors – who appears alongside co-star Heather Thomas in a brief end-credits cameo – “The Fall Guy” ditches the show’s bounty hunter angle to pump up the conflation of on-set and real life stunts performed by Gosling’s Colt Seavers.

Radiating charm, Gosling capitalizes on the Kenergy of his Oscar-nominated performance as a living doll in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Combining many of Ken’s positive traits with several of private investigator Holland March’s memorable mannerisms as displayed in Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys,” Gosling writes another chapter in the story of his impressive career. As characters, Ken and March are better written, deeper, and more dynamic than Seavers, whose lack of richness Gosling manages to overcome in scene after scene. An equal measure of applause belongs to Blunt, whose camera operator-turned-director Jody Moreno, like Ginger Rogers, matches her castmate, only backwards and in high heels (apologies to Beth Novey).

Filled with a number of showstoppers that take place during the production of Moreno’s feature debut, the “Mad Max”-esque science fiction epic “Metalstorm,” “The Fall Guy” leans on Leitch’s visual sensibilities to overcome the flimsy dialogue and uninspired plotting of Drew Pearce’s screenplay, which is easily the movie’s weakest link. When Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s A-lister Tom Ryder mysteriously disappears, Seavers, previously sidelined by a serious work-related injury, returns to stunt crew duty hoping to rekindle his romantic relationship with Moreno. Instead, Colt quickly becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation. Fisticuffs and car chases ensue.

Anytime Blunt and Gosling interact, including a great split screen scene inspired by “Pillow Talk,” the pulse of “The Fall Guy” spikes with excitement and possibility. The fragile reasoning that keeps the one-time sweethearts apart makes as much sense as the lengths to which producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) goes to get Seavers to locate her missing lead actor. And with the exception of the quiet scenes between Colt and Jody, which are so good that some lines showcased in the trailer didn’t even make the final cut, we’re not supposed to take seriously any of this ridiculousness.

Leitch, a former stunt performer and coordinator who doubled for Brad Pitt five times, incorporates an in-universe plea for a long overdue Oscar category to recognize the work of the talented professionals who risk (and sometime lose) their lives in the course of making films that continue to dazzle and delight viewers searching for the vicarious adrenaline rush of a perfectly executed practical effect. “The Fall Guy” even manages to squeeze in genuine concerns about the encroachment of A.I. and the dangers it portends. Those two considerations, though only fleetingly addressed, land with an explosive bang.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“I’m not a homewrecker,” insists Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan as she prematurely ends a three-way encounter involving doubles partners and best pals Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). Tashi’s instincts will hold serve throughout Luca Guadagnino’s sweaty, sexy, and ridiculously entertaining “Challengers.” Guadagnino’s fascinating, enviable filmography is stocked with triumphs large and small. From 2009 breakthrough “I Am Love” to critical apex “Call Me by Your Name” (the latter unfortunately stained after the fact by Armie Hammer’s career implosion), the Italian filmmaker explores desire like his life depends on it.

Guadagnino even christened “I Am Love,” “A Bigger Splash,” and “Call Me by Your Name” his “Desire Trilogy.” Now, working from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino turns his attention to another kind of triplicate in a sinewy showcase certain to extend the upward trajectory of the no-ceiling-in-sight Zendaya. Presented in a complex series of time-jumps that mimic the give-and-take aspects of a close tennis match (if not the linear chronology), “Challengers” uses the game as an extended metaphor to scrutinize the enigmatic appetite of a young woman who concentrates her considerable acumen to replace the power and control she loses when a career-ending injury forces her to switch from player to coach.

As a symbolic vehicle with which to pique viewer interest, the sport of tennis has been courted (pun intended) in a variety of genres. While Richard Loncraine’s “Wimbledon” parallels several aspects of the game recycled here by Kuritzkes and Guadagnino, Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale,” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” are just a few other films that communicate something beyond the swing of the racket. None of these examples, however, have as sizable an influence on “Challengers” as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”

Both “Strangers on a Train” and “Challengers” understand that tennis can reveal class distinctions via the game’s snobbish and elitist jeu de paume and Sport of Kings history; Guadagnino never misses an opportunity to contrast the wealth of Team Donaldson against the sleep-in-your-car scruffiness of Zweig – even if the latter, as Tashi claims, is faking his hardship. Like striving up-and-comer Guy Haines and wealthy, psychopathic schemer Bruno Antony in “Strangers on a Train,” the predictable/dull masochism of Art and the rakish volatility of Patrick invite us to compare the criss-crossed pairs. Both movies pave a path to intense homoeroticism.

In a shot taken directly from Hitchcock, Tashi stares straight ahead from her seat at center court while the faces of all the other spectators swivel left and right, following the trajectory of the volley. In 1951, of course, the onscreen repercussions of toying with any queerness – whether overt or covert – typically resulted, by the final frames if not sooner, in death. This difference is where “Challengers” and “Strangers on a Train” most notably part ways. Guadagnino makes sure that everything, from the pops and grunts on the soundtrack to the balls-eye view of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography to the urgency of another fantastic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, leads to a climactic moment to be savored.