The 27-year-old American actor has gone from the Disney channel to new classy arthouse threesome drama Challengers, via a massive blockbuster and a hot-button TV series. So can she convince as an Oscar contender?

Actor-model-producer Zendaya Coleman – universally known mononymously, without her last name – has never been short of attention, but it feels as if the 27-year-old has arrived at a breakthrough moment. With the tennis romance Challengers arriving in cinemas, in which she is the central focus, the sci-fi blockbuster Dune: Part Two still reeling in audiences, and acting as the simultaneous cover star of two separate editions of Vogue magazine – the British and the American – Zendaya appears to have achieved a new level.

Her career has so far specialised in an impressively high number of attention-grabbing moments, including appearing in a spectacularly bizarre metallic silver “robot suit” at the premiere of Dune: Part Two earlier this year, and the Challengers trailer release in June 2023, with its sexually suggestive premise of a threeway love affair.

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Muscular bodies dripping with sweat are all over cinema screens – and each other. But these films are very different from the sports romances of old

This spring is shaping up to be the season of the artful athletic romance in cinema. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding and Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers both offer up their own twisted queer romances set within the world of sport. Both film-makers share a preoccupation with their athletes, lingering over their bodies in ultra-closeup. Muscles ripple and swell like the powerful pulse of the tide. Perfect, glistening orbs of sweat form then drift off the body in slow motion. In these films, ripped, toned bodies become tantalising, treacherous landscapes, and it’s on this physical terrain that we can see exactly how and why the characters’ internal desires play out.

Love Lies Bleeding opens with a pulsating montage in a grimy gym as Glass confronts us with running, cycling, lifting, pressing bodies in all of their sweating, straining vulgarity. Meanwhile, Lou (Kristen Stewart), the uninspired gym manager, is sticking her hand down the venue’s perpetually clogged toilet. However, when Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a wannabe bodybuilder, rolls through town, all this grotesquery becomes a thing of beauty. They begin a romance. Lou pumps her lover full of steroids and constantly ogles her dense muscles.

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Sarah Jessica Parker is the latest A-lister to lavish our fair isles with praise, from the transport networks to the eggs. I guess it’s easy to overlook problems when you’re a wealthy tourist

‘I want to know Jubilee, Piccadilly, Northern, I want to know Edgware … Your system here is exquisite.” That is Sarah Jessica Parker raving about the tube . “Goodge” she added, in wonderment, rolling the word around in her mouth like a mint humbug. She is in London, appearing in Plaza Suite at the Savoy theatre, having the time of her life and appreciating breakfast foods. “There’s these eggs here … that I go mad for, they’re called Burford, they have those orange yolks … oh my God … I love your rashers here,” she told the chef Ruth Rogers on Rogers’ podcast. Her Instagram features black cabs, graffiti and her learning which bus “gets me where I need to go. On time.”

Meanwhile, Zendaya has been “spotted patiently queueing for a Gail’s coffee and pastry ” and doing a big shop in New Malden Waitrose; Vogue has declared her “ one sausage roll away ” from honorary Briton status.

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Luca Guadagnino’s terrifically absorbing screwball dramedy features a devastatingly cool leading lady, Josh O’Connor on rallying form and zinging extended dialogue rallies to match

It’s almost too good to be true. Could cinema be witnessing the birth of a stunning new mixed doubles partnership? Last year, Korean-Canadian film-maker Celine Song gave us her wonderful, Oscar-nominated debut film Past Lives , a personal love-triangle movie about a South Korean woman in the US, married to a white American writer, poignantly reconnecting with her Korean childhood sweetheart; the fictional writer, incidentally, has a novel out called Boner. Now Song’s actual white American husband Justin Kuritzkes has written this love-triangle movie, an uproarious screwball dramedy of straight sex and queer tennis: one player, incidentally, is renowned for his large penis.

Some day, film school courses will be devoted to parallel-textual analyses of these two films, and maybe the legendary third wheel will come forward with a screenplay satirising sexual stereotypes, about a woman and a man who create a sensitive drama and a macho comedy from the same situation. Challengers is terrifically absorbing and funny, with zinging extended dialogue rallies – though its cop-out ending fudges what we all know about tennis. Like life, it’s a brutal zero-sum game of winners and losers.

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The much-anticipated follow-up to Denis Villeneuve’s extravagant Frank Herbert adaptation takes us back to the desert with some major new faces

• This article contains spoilers for Dune: Part Two

Three years after Denis Villeneuve left us in the middle of the desert and the story, we’re finally back to the Duniverse. The French-Canadian auteur gambled with the first Dune , adapting only half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi tome; Part Two picks up where the first film left off, with Timothée Chalamet’s high-born Paul Atreides stranded on the desert planet Arrakis, attempting to ingratiate himself to the indigenous Fremen while the fate of the universe on his shoulders – if you believe the prophecies.

Like the book, the second half of this grandiose, ambivalent epic deals with shadowy propaganda, the power of faith, the deadly risks of mythic destiny, political insurgencies, atomic weapons and imperial violence. Also, giant sandworms, finally in full battle form. The extremely hype-y trailers, coupled with near-universally glowing reviews, stellar audience scores and a good old-fashioned press blitz by not one but four young movie stars helped Dune: Part Two to a better-than expected box office – $81.5m domestically, $178m total , the biggest opening weekend since Barbie.

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Denis Villeneuve’s monumental adaptation expands its extraordinary world of shimmering strangeness. It’s impossible to imagine anyone doing it better

The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s monumental Dune adaptation lands with a sternum-juddering crash; it’s another shroom of a film, an epic sci-fi hallucination whose images speak of fascism and imperialism, of guerrilla resistance and romance. Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel – working with co-writer Jon Spaihts – draws on David Lean, George Lucas and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in the (perhaps inevitable) mega-stadium combat scene with the tiny billions of CGI crowds in the bleachers. But he really has made it all his own: secular political cruelty meets Indigenous people’s struggle in those vast mysterious planetscapes. The sound design throbs and drones in this film’s bloodstream, lending a queasy frisson to its extraordinary visual spectacle and the recurrent horror-fetish BDSM chic which appears to govern so much intergalactic-wrongdoer style.

My only reservation is that some of the momentum that the first part had built up has been lost since that movie was released more than two years ago. Those outside the existing Dune fanbase could feel that the ending does not deliver the resounding closure to which we all might, maybe naively, consider ourselves entitled to at the end of 330 minutes total screen time. And the final eventful moments of the film feel a bit rushed, as if Shakespeare had decided to shrink Henry VI Part III into a zappy coda to go at the end of Part II.

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As the Sag-Aftra strikes roll on, film schedules are being torn up and A-listers are ditching promotional duties. But what’s a film festival without the talent?

Picture the scene. A journalist flying to the Venice film festival earlier this week is wheeling her luggage through the duty-free shop on her way to the gate. Pausing to glance at the illuminated perfume ads gazing at her from among the whiskey bottles and the Toblerones bigger than cricket bats, she sees the face of Zendaya, the 27-year-old star of the Spider-Man and Dune franchises, her hair rippling against a violet sky as she sits astride a white steed to promote Lancôme’s fragrance Idôle.

It is an eye-catching image, but also a bittersweet one. The journalist finds herself dabbing away a tear as she realises that this is the closest she will get to Zendaya for the foreseeable future. She scurries off to catch her flight, pondering the strange and starless universe she is about to enter.

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