CineLinkr #213: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Challengers stretches its love triangle across thirteen years and then squeezes it onto a tennis court. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross supply the music. A normal person would call this an argument; these people have arranged seating and a scoreboard.

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🟢 Easy: Tennis careers drive the story

Movies: Challengers · Wimbledon · Battle of the Sexes · King Richard

Tashi's injury in Challengers turns a player into a coach, while the two men in her life occupy very different rungs of the professional ladder. Their careers are inseparable from the relationship. Winning a match might settle the sporting question, but it has an ambitious amount of emotional admin attached.

Wimbledon pairs a veteran player with a rising star. Battle of the Sexes draws on the 1973 match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King Richard follows the father and coach of Venus and Serena Williams. That last one is the useful distinction: this group doesn't require a tennis romance. The sport must shape the characters' lives, including the parent who plans those lives for them.

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🟡 Medium: Witnesses need protection from killers

Movies: Witness · Eraser · Bird on a Wire · Killshot

In Witness, an Amish boy sees a murder in a Philadelphia railway station. Harrison Ford's detective has to protect him and his mother, with corruption inside law enforcement making the badge a poor guarantee of safety. Peter Weir gives the protective mission a setting that changes how the detective can live and work.

Eraser puts a witness to an illegal arms deal under a US Marshal's protection. Bird on a Wire sends criminals after a man whose earlier testimony could still hurt them. The couple in Killshot discover that entering witness protection doesn't make a pursuing hitman disappear. The shared problem is specific: somebody knows something dangerous, and the people implicated would prefer that knowledge to stop breathing. The paperwork is not bulletproof.

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🔵 Hard: Titles name parts of the body

Movies: Eyes Wide Shut · The Eyes of Tammy Faye · Hands of Stone · Head

Eyes. Eyes again. Hands. Head. The connection sits in the spelling, although the films encourage you to look elsewhere. Hands of Stone is a sports biography about Roberto Duran, which makes it a tempting passenger in the tennis group until you remember he boxes.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye follows the televangelist's life and marriage. Eyes Wide Shut sends Tom Cruise through Kubrick's psychological mystery. Their identical body word survives a spectacular difference in what the films are doing with it.

Then there's Head, the 1968 satirical musical starring the Monkees. It contributes the shortest possible answer and somehow the greatest amount of distraction. You don't need to have seen it to solve this row; you need to stop asking four unrelated films for a shared plot.

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🟣 Tricky: Cannes awarded them its top prize

Movies: Pulp Fiction · Titane · I, Daniel Blake · Dheepan

The Palme d'Or years line up as 1994 for Pulp Fiction, 2015 for Dheepan, 2016 for I, Daniel Blake and 2021 for Titane. Four films, one particular festival honour. An Oscar connection would be a different answer.

That is the satisfying click here: you can stop trying to make Tarantino, Ken Loach, Jacques Audiard and Julia Ducournau tell the same sort of story. The jury decisions put them together. Their differences make the row better, especially with Titane beside Loach's joiner from Newcastle.

Ducournau became the second woman to win the Palme with Titane. Cannes had room for her body horror, for Audiard's Tamil refugees rebuilding their lives in France, and for the other two filmmakers' very different concerns. The trophy has a broader viewing habit than most recommendation algorithms.

I still like Head sneaking into a board that ends with the Palme d'Or. It has brought its own idea of a respectable evening.

For another trip to the court, the October 30 PixelLinkr puzzle has tennis games, playable cops and a surprisingly busy creature-breeding department.