Every Luca Guadagnino Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best

The erotic drama appears to be all but a lost art form these days, thanks to largely not existing aside from fare like Fifty Shades of Grey and 365 Days, which, though popular, give it a bad name. On the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of craftsmanship and intelligence lie the best films of Luca Guadagnino, whose latest film is the widely celebrated steamy tennis drama Challengers starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. From a smart, non-linear and altogether attention-grabbing script by first-time feature writer Justin Kuritzkes, Challengers follows the lives of two former best friends and the woman they’re both infatuated with as they navigate the hurdles, heartbreak, and triumph of professional tennis.

Guadagnino’s very best movies are, on the surface at least, about the sexual escapades of rich people. But they’re produced (and crucially, acted) with so much understanding of human fragility that it’s impossible not to be amused, moved and altogether enthralled by them. The notably tactile, often voyeuristic filmmaker has notably delved into horror as well in recent years, making Challengers (which opened atop the U.S. box office, remarkable for an arthouse movie, and Guadagnino’s first chart-topper) feel even more like a resounding return to form. Where does it rank within his canon? Ranked from misstep to masterpiece, these are the feature films of Luca Guadagnino.

8 ‘Melissa P.’ (2005)

Starring Maria Valverde, Primo Reggiani and Geraldine Chaplin

Melissa P. is a movie that’s best to discuss swiftly, and in the past tense. Guadagnino’s sophomore feature is about a 14-year-old girl’s sexual awakening (from a script and screen story that he co-adapted). It’s told with some of the sense of discovery that would, in a more polished state, make his later work so good, but it’s hard not to walk away from this half-baked drama feeling anything except a little unclean. Young love and budding sexuality are important topics that can be explored very well, but Melissa P. feels cheap in a way that has little to do with its budget.

Every great artist stumbles, and it’s best when it happens early on. Early flashes of brilliance and signs of the knowing human drama to come in this celebrated career pop up here and there, and Melissa P. is not as bad as some corners of the internet might try to tell you it is, but it’s best to just avoid.

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7 ‘The Protagonists’ (1999)

Starring Tilda Swinton, Andrew Tiernan and Fabrizia Sacchi

Guadagnino’s debut feature is also his first feature collaboration with longtime muse Tilda Swinton. The chameleonic and supremely talented English actress’s star rose throughout the early aughts before she won an Oscar for Tony Gilroy‘s masterful legal thriller Michael Clayton. In mockumentary The Protagonists, Swinton plays Actress, one part of an Italian film crew exploring the real-life murder of Mohammed El-Sayed in London.

It’s a step up from Melissa P. in that it’s a little less uncomfortable, but experimental The Protagonists is really only for Guadagnino completionists. Fortunately, the director was stretching his legs with his first two features. From here on out, things get much, much better.

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6 ‘A Bigger Splash’ (2015)

Starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes

Swinton and Suspiria collaborator Dakota Johnson co-star alongside Matthias Schoenaerts and a never-better Ralph Fiennes in a splashy, insatiable re-imagining of Jacques Deray‘s La Piscine. Guadagnino himself has christened the drama, about a deadly love quadrangle set on a picturesque Italian island, as the second part of his Desire trilogy between I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name. Paired with The Grand Budapest Hotel from a year earlier, it marks an opulently tragicomic, throw-down sort of mid-career renaissance for Fiennes.

If the well-acted, non-stop visually arresting A Bigger Splash has any shortcoming of note, it’s that it doesn’t transcend being a soap opera. It never really tries to. Oh, what a show it all is, though. It’s a testament to Guadagnino’s overall quality control that the deliriously entertaining, confident A Bigger Splash is relatively low on this list.

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5 ‘Suspiria’ (2018)

Starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton and Mia Goth

So, as was inevitable, we’ve come to the most divisive film on this list. Maybe it’s the most divisive horror movie of the modern era.Suspiria 2018 is one of those movies where it’s not hard to track down zero-star reviews or five-star reviews. Truth lies somewhere in the middle of all that. This is a remake of Dario Argento‘s masterpiece about witches in a German ballet academy in that it reuses some names and the basic premise. Argento’s movie was essential as artistry elevating mindless pulp. Guadagnino’s take is a sprawling political-historical epic that runs one hour longer.

The impressive set pieces are as haunting as they are disgusting. The characters and their supernatural methods are much further explored. This being a Guadagnino movie, it’s an audiovisual marvel, shot on 35mm stock with a disarming score by Thom Yorke. But some elements, from a distracting casting choice to uneven effects to the grueling runtime, hold Suspiria back from the original’s heights. Dakota Johnson is terrific as ambitious ingénue Susy Bannion. As was made clear with Madame Web and Fifty Shades, the naturalistic, talented and magnetic Johnson has a way of emerging from anything even greater and stronger than before.

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4 ‘Bones and All’ (2022)

Starring Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell and Mark Rylance

A little like Badlands for a new generation, Guadagnino’s second, slightly more accessible horror feature follows young Midwestern cannibals on the run and in love. Only it’s really horror as metaphor; this is a movie about being queer or in any way othered, and the metaphor works astonishingly well throughout. Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are pitch perfect, and the young romance is quite affecting, but it’s Mark Rylance who cuts deepest here. Generally recognized as one of the best actors alive, the English Oscar-winner (who also played the Big Friendly Giant in another movie), is impossible to shake as a cannibal who cannibals fear.

Guadagnino should keep making horror pictures. He’s a director with the intelligence to know a good performance and even good casting can be as shocking and unsettling as explicit violence (Bones and All has lots and lots of all of this). How often has a horror picture come along that’s genuinely disturbing, even for genre diehards—that’s also this tender and earnest, sad and sweet… if ever?

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3 ‘I Am Love’ (2009)

Starring Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, and Edoardo Gabbriellini

For I Am Love, Tilda Swinton learned to speak Italian in a Russian accent. How was this performance not Oscar-nominated? For that matter, how did this film not get more exposure? This is Guadagnino’s first masterpiece, of three. Swinton is nothing short of titanic as an erudite, repressed Milanese matriarch who falls for her son’s friend and business partner, a handsome chef (Edoardo Gabbriellini). Guadagnino fully comes into his own as a distinct and formidable filmmaker in a visual rapture that’s actually all about internal discovery.

Among too many merits to count, I Am Love is a movie that, like that moment with Anton Ego in the finale of Ratatouille, knows how to remind us that food can stir one’s soul. It’s a direct means of connection and a way of being seen. Food can hit you just like music. Or like a really damn good movie.

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2 ‘Call Me By Your Name’ (2017)

Starring Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer and Michael Stuhlbarg

Based on André Aciman‘s palm-sweating, heart-fluttering novel about a teen who falls in love with his father’s dashing doctoral intern, Call Me By Your Name is one of those rare times when filmmakers spun a great book into something even better and richer. There are some fairly liberal changes made to the text, especially near the end, but it’s a film that perfectly captures the essence of what makes the intensely intimate book so impactful.

Call Me By Your Name is timeless, and it perhaps is most fascinating as a late-career move from iconic English filmmakerJames Ivory, who won an Academy Award for adapting the script. It’s a movie that feels first heartbreak without pulling its punches, while looking ahead to new loves. In an unspoken kind of a way, the movie makes damn sure to end with as much sweet as bitter. Chalamet’s performance in the final shot alone should have won him the Oscar for which he was nominated. First love and the proverbial summer that changed everything have never been realized more fully or so perfectly.

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1 ‘Challengers’ (2024)

Starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist

Thanks to the impetus of a techno soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross,Challengers is a pulsating, stunning exercise in masterful cinematic exuberance. The three leads (O’Connor and Faist have long been the best part of whatever project they’re in) form the most captivating, hilarious and thoroughly imperfect will-they-or-won’t-they throuple since Y Tu Mamá También, but this is Zendaya’s movie. In the shadow of Dune: Part Two‘s runaway success, it would appear she can currently carry a theatrical release as well as any actress on the planet.

Call Me By Your Name remains Guadagnino’s most intellectually stimulating and visually striking feature, but he’s arguably outdone himself here in terms of pure punch. When was the last time an arthouse movie worked this well as giddy popcorn-munching entertainment? Drive, maybe? Kuritzkes’ unusually structured but deliberate script is so smart and original: it’s about competition and competitiveness, but it’s just as interested in chance. It’s about the drive for excellence, but it’s way more interested in foibles. It’s the best debut feature script since Cord Jefferson‘s Oscar-winning American Fiction, and in a roundabout, deconstructed kind of way, Challengers delivers everything that makes the sports genre so uniquely exhilarating.