Queer

Luca Guadagnino's Queer premiered in the main competition of the 81st Venice International Film Festival in September 2024, where it received an eleven-minute standing ovation and competed for the Golden Lion. It is the Italian director's adaptation of William S. Burroughs's semi-autobiographical 1985 novella, written largely in Mexico City in the early 1950s and shelved for decades. Guadagnino, who arrived at the project after Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All and Challengers, frames it as the third part of a loose trilogy about desire and consumption.

Daniel Craig plays William Lee, an American expatriate haunting the cantinas of Mexico City; Drew Starkey is Eugene Allerton, the much younger discharged serviceman whose arrival reorders Lee's days. Jason Schwartzman appears as the writer Joe Guidry and Lesley Manville turns up later as the eccentric Dr Cotter. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom builds the film on Cinecittà soundstages, treating the city as a hand-painted theatre set, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross contribute a wandering, lonely score and Justin Kuritzkes (Guadagnino's Challengers writer) handles the screenplay.

Critical response was sharply divided but largely admiring. The National Board of Review named Craig Best Actor and the film one of the year's Top Ten; the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Critics' Choice and Screen Actors Guild followed with Craig nominations. Sight & Sound and Cahiers du Cinéma placed it on year-end lists. Across reviews, even sceptics agreed that Craig's performance was the strangest, most exposed work of his career, and that Queer stands as one of Guadagnino's most personal films.