Emma Stone and Steve Carrell are on winning form as Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in this witty, charming, terrifically entertaining movie about the pair’s notorious tennis showdown in 1973. Stone’s King is the world’s top women’s tennis player while Carell’s middle-aged former men’s champion Riggs is a serial hustler and clownish showman. He throws down his challenge at a time when women players are fighting a sexist tennis establishment for equality, with King prominent in the vanguard. As the big game approaches, both figures have off-court issues to grapple with. Gambling addict Riggs is striving to save his marriage to his heiress wife (Elisabeth Shue), while King is struggling to come to terms with her sexuality as she embarks on an affair with free-spirited hairdresser Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough). Working from a script by Slumdog Millionaire’s Simon Beaufoy, husband-and-wife directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (the team behind Little Miss Sunshine), put this together with playful flair, recreating the era in all its naff splendour and toxic misogyny.
Battle of the Sexes is showing at the Odeon Leicester Square on Saturday 7 October at 6pm and on Monday 9 at 2.20pm, and at the Curzon Mayfair on Saturday 14 at 8.45pm.
