The Devil, Ghostbusters & Zendaya: At The Movies This Week

Challenger: It's Game, Set & Match For Zendaya-Starrer

The tennis court and the bedroom serve as a springboard for games of desire and rivalry in Luca Guadagnino's latest film. Prahlad Srihari reviews.

Dir: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Zendaya

Playing in: Theatres

Heat and sweat pour off the screen in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. Desire saturates the atmosphere like humidity. A night of drinking edges towards a threesome when childhood friends and doubles partners, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor), invite 18-year-old tennis phenom Tashi (Zendaya) back to their hotel room. Lips rally. Tongues volley for control. The three hot and rising sports stars, played by three hot and rising movie stars, make out like they want to devour each other and be devoured, evoking the ravenous desires of the young cannibal couple from Guadagnino’s previous feature Bones and All. Longing seeps through the screen, pulling us in like voyeurs and fogging our glasses. We can feel the pulse of the passions fuelling their hunger. Just as things get hot and heavy, a bucket of cold water is thrown on our expectations. We are deprived of a climax. Without mincing words, the film blue-balls us. All the same, it is because desire is forestalled instead of fulfilled that it cuts much deeper.

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With A Bigger Splash and Call Me by Your Name, Guadagnino showed he was a natural chronicler of the summer, distilling the season in all its airy possibilities into rhapsodic dramas of the senses. Now, with his new film, he builds on his reputation as one of contemporary cinema’s premier sensualists. Challengers positively quivers with beauty, ambition, and the exquisite torture of fickle passions. The tennis court and the bedroom serve as a springboard for games of desire and rivalry.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire | It's Time To Give Up The Ghost

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a sorry spectre-cle, a cold hard cashgrab that points to the future by exhuming the past

Dir: Gil Kenan

Cast: Paul Rudd, Finn Wolfhard, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson

Playing in: Theatres

Here we are, with yet another unasked-for blockbuster wannabe costumed in nostalgia regalia. It comes bearing a familiar brand name and could easily be mistaken for a Disney crossover. Let’s not dance around it. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a sorry spectre-cle, a cold hard cashgrab that points to the future by exhuming the past. We live in a world where every studio insists on putting the cart before the horse, despite not having a thoroughbred to push their booty to the finish line. Every franchise is in a race to the bottom with studios cannibalising their vaults to keep up with the competition.

The Ghostbusters reboots phantomime the Marvel model, trading the slime, goofiness and improvised riffs of the 1984 hit for nine-figure maximalism and mythos. Lost in the digital noise is all that made the original a hit in the first place. Frozen Empire drains what little joy hadn’t already leaked out of the franchise with each sequel, reboot, reset, whatever you want to call it. The critical misjudgement that director Gil Kenan and his co-screenwriter Jason Reitman (son of the late Ivan who directed the original) make is in believing the franchise needed more world-building, instead of streamlining the operation for more laughs. Neither does Frozen Empire have you shivering with glee. Nor does it creep it real. The only thing that goes bump in the dark is our hands smacking our head in frustration. At this point, IP agnostics cannot be enticed into buying a ticket for a movie with “Ghostbusters” or “Frozen Empire” in its title unless it’s a horror movie about finding closure after being ghosted or iced.

— P.S.

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Late Night With The Devil: Satan Takes The Stage In This Chilling Spookfest

The devil is in the details and the entrails of a movie that feels like a time capsule of a pre-Internet age

Dir: Cameron & Colin Cairned

Cast: David Dastmalchian, Ingrid Torelli, Laura Gordon

Playing in: Theatres

“Ladies and gentlemen, please stay tuned for a live television first, as we attempt to commune with the devil. But not before a word from our sponsors.”

The medium is the message in Late Night with the Devil. Imagine tuning into a talk show that functions as a mass hypnosis. Imagine the devil being conjured on live TV and using the camera to see and be seen. Imagine if such a malign presence could be beamed right into our living rooms through the spirit box. Imagine the everyday ritual of watching TV making us wriggle in what should be our safest space.

No, this isn’t an unaired episode of The Eric Andre Show, though our discomfort does mount by the same token, as an interview descends into all-out chaos. Nor is this a behind-the-scenes special about Jimmy Fallon’s cringeworthy 2016 interview with Donald Trump, though the talk show host here does something no less misguided. This is a possession romp from Australian brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes. And it comes with a diabolical setup: the power of ratings compels desperate ‘70s talk show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) to bring on a possessed teenaged girl during Sweeps Week; the proverbial shit hits the fan; the movie we see is presented as uncensored found footage of the episode.

— P.S.

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