Until my 72-hour long adaptation of Infinite Jest is finally accepted by Hollywood, the tennis movie will remain a standard of the three-act prestige drama and the issues-led awards winner. Its grand themes, locker-room back biting, major tournaments and Jason vs Goliath stand-offs are a screenwriter’s wet dream, while its cast of privileged beautiful people perpetuate Hollywood’s eternal obsession with luxury properties and cut-glass accents. 

It's a rich mixture, and one that’s far from formulaic. Tennis can act as a potent symbol for almost anything, whether that’s unrequited love, midlife crises, the perfect murder, or the fight against patriarchy. Proving its malleability is Julie Keeps Quiet, Leonardo Van Dijl’s debut feature in which a young woman at a tennis academy decides to remain silent when her head coach is suspended after another young student takes her life. ‘There’s a clinical nature to Van Dijl’s directorial approach,’ said Emma Simmonds in our review of the film. ‘Julie has, after all, built a wall to protect herself and this distance is reflected in an unflashy, incredibly patient film that’s often intriguingly ambiguous while finding plenty of dramatic meat in the unsaid. You’ll be scouring each carefully constructed frame for answers.’ Read the full review. 

Julie Keeps Quiet is another milestone in a subgenre that can seemingly examine any aspect of the human experience. But what other tennis movies have lobbed their way across the court and into audience’s unsuspecting faces? We’ve rounded up a few of history’s finest celluloid racket-thwackers as a brief primer on how the genre has tackled big issues and served up some stinkers. Some are volleying over the net and others are cinematic double faults, but all are aces in their own way (don’t worry, that’s our mandated allotment of tennis-based puns out of the way).

Tennis as sex 

The buttoned-up niceties of Wimbledon make it easy to forget that tennis has facilitated many tales of raging hormones; it’s not for nothing that around 300,000 condoms were distributed to athletes at Paris’ Olympic Village in 2024. Wafting the stink of sex from every backhand and volley is Challengers (2024), Luca Guadagnino’s breakout hit that merges high camp with the self-seriousness of an Amazon-produced teen drama. It follows a love triangle between three hotshot tennis stars (Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor) as they pair up, tackle tournaments, grow old (as this is a tennis film, hitting your early 30s is considered prehistoric), become enemies, and make as many steamy insinuations about rutting as they can cram into a single conversation. From orgasmic noises on-court to the bristling proximity of firm flesh in the locker room, every facet of the sport is a substitute for a bit of backhanding between the bed sheets. 

The game itself is shot with the excitable air of a visual storyteller who doesn’t care for his subject matter. Guadagnino boasted that he had no interest in tennis before shooting the film, which explains the exhausting bag of tricks he employs in the manner of a long-haul trucker buying poppers at every pitstop to keep himself awake behind his wheel. But audiences didn’t care; like Guadagnino himself, they were more interested in seeing a threesome between Hollywood’s rising elite.

Also merging tennis with heavy petting is Wimbledon (2004), a British romcom following Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst as they enjoy a sexual frisson during the world’s most prestigious sporting tournament. Will they? Won’t they? Spoilers: they obviously will, but that doesn’t mean fun is lacking in this Richard Curtis knock-off. Bettany walks a deft knife edge between the charm and smarm that was a prerequisite for any British film that couldn’t afford Hugh Grant, while its grand finale is shot with incredible care and dramatic flair. Predictable though it may be, this comfort food has earned its place in the ITV2 schedules next to Love Actually and Notting Hill. 

Tennis as philosophy and politics 

In Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace’s defiantly unfilmable novel) tennis becomes the root of living for many of its characters, and its many rules and limitations become a philosophical treatise. ‘Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive,’ wrote Wallace. ‘You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely.’ 

No film can hope to reach the same metaphysical heights, but plenty have given a simple back and forth a philosophical or political backbone. Take Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005), which is hammy nonsense if you’re from the UK or a perceptive work of the middle-class milieu if you’re not. Former professional tennis player Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) finds himself in the midst of a torrid affair with Nola (Scarlett Johansson) and uses his intellectual understanding of tennis (in this case, an acceptance of fate and chance) as a means of understanding his predicament. While tin-eared in its perception of the UK’s social norms as any of Allen’s films set outside New York, this rollercoaster-style thriller of twist and turns weaves tennis analogies through its story to create a work that strains for profundity. 

The theme of chance also lingers at the forefront of Strangers On A Train (1951), Alfred Hitchcock’s stylish crime thriller based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel from the previous year (Hitch didn’t hang about) in which a champion tennis player crosses paths with a murderous psychopath. Typical mid-period Hitchcock, it’s filled with exceptional set-pieces but radiates boredom when its characters are forced to unweave its labyrinthine plot. But its tennis sequence is a masterstroke; slow and methodical and filled with the tension that our hero is more likely to end up in a jail cell than catch a killer. In a filmography overflowing with characters caught in impossible situations, this is one of Hitchcock’s finest. 

From philosophy to politics with Battle Of The Sexes (2017), a star vehicle for Emma Stone and Steve Carell which focuses on the real-life match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Shot on the cusp of Stone’s ascent to world-conquering fame, it’s both a crowd-pleaser and somewhat of a missed opportunity. This is a true story in which a champion tennis player was carried on court atop a golden throne while cradling a pig under her arm, and yet the visuals are determined to play it straight with a cigarette-yellow vision of the 1970s. It’s tempting to imagine Federico Fellini or Ken Russell taking the reins of this project and giving the unhinged miasma of sport and gender politics a sense of flamboyant mania.

Tennis as, well, tennis

Every now and again, a cigar is simply a cigar, a serve a serve, and a face-off between titans about little more than the challenge of the game and purity of its craft. That’s the case with Borg Vs McEnroe (2017), a biopic focusing on the professional rivalry between Björn Borg and John McEnroe which reached its fevered height in the legendary Wimbledon Men’s Singles final of 1980. Filmed at the time of Shia LaBeouf’s baffling rise into the upper echelons of stardom, it’s an excessively self-serious work as overwrought as Superbrat himself. Yet it cuts to the heart of a time before McEnroe became a parody, smashing rackets in adverts and making campy cameos in movies. He was, for a brief period, a spark setting a placid sport ablaze. 

Overshadowed by its leading man’s open-palmed southpaw is King Richard (2021), Will Smith’s tour de force that won him an Oscar and, on the same night, saw him banned from the ceremony for ten years after assaulting Chris Rock live onstage. What a shame. Behind the controversy sits a sturdy award-bait film telling the story of Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena, as he grooms his children for genius-level sportsdom against all the odds. He’s a complicated man, both driven by and held back by a desire to control the world around him (although given that this was executive produced by Venus and Serena Williams, his rough edges are rarely as threatening as they must have been in reality). Holding its confused third act and clunky dialogue together is Smith, who deserves that Oscar for subverting his cosy image to create an ambiguous, frequently unlikeable underdog.

Tennis as cinematic atrocity 

Some actors enter the film industry to win Oscars, honing their craft until they can unpick the mysteries of the human condition with the merest glance. Others are Seann William Scott, whose Hollywood dream seems to involve assaulting audiences with jokes about diarrhoea until he becomes unbankable. Balls Out: Gary The Tennis Coach (2009) continues his habit of making what can only be called ‘Stifler, but... ’ movies. In this case, he’s ‘Stifler, but a janitor turned tennis coach’, which is about as gut-busting as it sounds. Scott is certainly game, happy to hop around in a jockstrap, vomit on a tennis court, defecate on a tennis court and fling juvenile verbiage around while on or adjacent to a tennis court. But no amount of jocular bodily fluids can save this limp offering from the makers of Dude, Where’s My Car? and Harold & Kumar Get The Munchies, who get caught in a tangle of racist, sexist and homophobic gags that remain as unpleasant now as they were on its straight-to-DVD release. 

While lacking in faecal matter, Jocks (1986) somehow feels grottier than Balls Out. Leering over a team of horrid sports louts as they score booze and gaze at totally tubular babes in Las Vegas, there’s no real plot beyond a tennis match at the end. Porky’s is the blueprint here, continuing that queasy genre of horny teenagers doing nothing except committing high japes (many of which count as sex crimes nowadays) and making incoherent bellowing noises at each other before the next grim one-liner. It was a different time, eh?

Julie Keeps Quiet is in cinemas from Friday 25 April; main picture: Nicolas Karakatsanis.