61st London Film Festival | Battle of the Sexes - Billie Jean King

Battle of The Sexes (2017) — (Image credit: Photo credit Melinda Sue Gordon)

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.

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.