Over three films in the 2010s, Rupert Wyatt Matt Reeves crafted — with the motion-captured performance of Andy Serkis — a surprisingly successful prequel series exploring the earliest days of what would become a planet ruled by intelligent apes. The Caesar trilogy envisioned a world at a crossroads, one at the precipice of being dramatically transformed by a virus that made humans stupid (prescient, huh?) and gifted their non-human primate brethren super-intelligence and the ability to speak. As the final film in that series ended, Caesar, the lab chimpanzee who started it all had emerged victorious over the humans, leading his non-people to a prosperity that he wouldn’t live to see for himself. Where do you go from there?

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the current Nineties Revival, but one undeniably good element is that is Hollywood’s hottest people are finally get to have fun being hot in movies again. Joining the likes of Anyone But You, Challengers, and Hit Man is David Leitch’s unlikely reimagining of the 1980s action-adventure procedural The Fall Guy. Dispensing with the formalities of a strict reboot the stuntman-turned-director instead lets Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt – the Oscar-nominated supporting cast from Barbenheimer– cook in a towering inferno of undeniable charisma.

Luca Guadagnino has long explored the way our sexy human bodies drive us to madness, whether it’s a steamy countryside romance, the horror of an elite ballet academy, or the insatiable hunger for human flesh that motivates a cross-country road trip. With Challengers, he transports us into the inner psychological warfare of the most dangerous game of all: men’s profession tennis.

Bertrand Bonello’s century-spanning tryptic is nothing if not inventive, but it’s sometimes hard to find the emotion in the high aesthetics. But if you give yourself over to it, you come to realize that maybe the chilly gulf is exactly the point of this stylish filmmaking exercise that melds science fiction and humane mysticism. Whether it’s in any given moment or spanning across time, its interlocking stories confront the impossibility of making deep simultaneous connections.

I love a movie that lets us watch an artist at work (see also, Showing Up) especially when it’s a craftsman of a job I’ve never considered.