Fifteen to love: the best tennis scenes in cinema – ranked!

As Wimbledon wows the crowds in London and tennis drama Challengers is set to open the Venice film festival next month, we serve up the best on-screen matches – but who has the advantage? An odd, rather contrived attempt to weld a Richard Curtis-type Anglo-American romcom to a tennis movie, demonstrating that maybe a whole film about tennis is just a bit too much and it’s better just to have one or two tennis scenes. Paul Bettany is the has-been Brit player who flukes a wildcard at Wimbledon, meets-cute with a rising US superstar played by Kirsten Dunst and they fall in love. As ever with tennis films, the difficulty is suspending disbelief that Bettany and Dunst are hitting and returning actual shots, never mind playing to championship level. Continue reading...