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    ‘Queer’ Review: The Seductive, Damaged Charm of Daniel Craig

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    The star kills off his Bond to inhabit a dissolute American expat in Luca Guadagnino’s handsome adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella.When William Lee stalks through Mexico City in “Queer,” he often seems on high alert, though sometimes he’s just high. The louche protagonist in Luca Guadagnino’s soft-serve adaptation of the William S. Burroughs autobiographical novella, Lee is a smoker, drinker, heroin addict and epic storyteller. He’s a refugee from America who at times seems like a visitor from another dimension. Played with sensitivity and predatory heat by Daniel Craig, Lee has a feverish mind, eyes like searchlights and a mouth that’s quick to sneer. There are moments when he seems possessed, though it’s not often clear what’s taken hold of his soul.As in the book, the movie follows Lee during an adventure that takes him from Mexico circa 1950 further south — to Panama, Ecuador and parts distinctly unknown — only to bring him back to where he began or thereabouts. The novella runs a scant 160 or so pages, and while it’s crammed with incisive details, characters and observations, the story is fairly compressed and, for the most part, focuses on Lee’s preoccupation with another American, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a tall, good-looking veteran. Lee first sees him gawking at a street cockfight, a distinctly Guadagnino take on what romantic stories call the meet cute.It’s rapture at first sight, at least for Lee, who’s soon chasing Allerton across the city. The younger man coyly, coolly, keeps Lee at a distance until they fall into bed. Guadagnino stages and shoots their encounter with discreet intimacy and pretty lighting, imbuing it with longing. This sensitivity may seem surprising given the outrageous visions, including a talking anus, that fill Burroughs’s most famous novel, the phantasmagoric “Naked Lunch” (1959). Yet desire suffuses his “Queer,” which he began writing in 1952, some six months after he fatally shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a horrifying, calamitously drunken game of William Tell.Burroughs remains best known as one of the coolest cats in the Beats; it was Jack Kerouac who suggested the title for “Queer.” Burroughs came from money, had a difficult past, sartorial flair, a hypnotically droning voice and a sinister aura. “He’s up there with the pope,” Patti Smith said. “Without Burroughs,” Lou Reed said, “modern lit would be a drama without a page, a sonnet without a song and a bone without gristle.” Burroughs, who died in 1997, and Kurt Cobain collaborated on a project, and Nirvana is featured on the soundtrack, suggesting Burroughs’s reach. He was a classic American figure: the nonconformist as cult.The most unconventional thing about the Lee in Guadagnino’s version of “Queer” is that he’s played by Craig, who, of course, is famous as the most recent James Bond. It’s understandable that Craig would seek out roles that put distance between him and Bond, a glossy cartoon of masculinity. It’s both startling and funny when, early in “Queer,” Lee enthusiastically claps a hand on the naked butt of an unnamed guy (Omar Apollo), a moment that Guadagnino presents in close-up so that the backside all but fills the screen, becoming a monumental landscape of desire. Craig isn’t just committing to this role; he is also throttling his Bond.Written by Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” “Queer” follows the novella fairly faithfully, though with customary and unexpected liberties. Lee pursues Allerton, and they become involved amid a blur of drinking, partying and talking. (Jason Schwartzman pops up as Joe, a lampoon of Allen Ginsberg that borders on the offensive.) In time, Lee and Eugene take off for South America to find what Lee calls yagé (the hallucinogen ayahuasca), a mystery drug with potential powers. The trip is by turns brutal and tender, and ends in a jungle where they meet an ayahuasca expert, Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), and her husband (the filmmaker Lisandro Alonso), who fling open the doors of perception.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Reintroduction of Daniel Craig

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      In love, it can be terrifying to show all your cards, to make yourself vulnerable, to let your desire be fully seen. What is offered to another person without reservation can also be taken without recompense. Still, because we want to be loved, we risk it.Maybe we don’t think much about that aspect of love, preferring to dwell — as most movies do — on all the moony, swoony parts. But that dangerous feeling of exposure is the central preoccupation of the new drama “Queer,” and it can’t be explored without a lead actor who is similarly willing to offer himself up.Enter Daniel Craig, 56, our erstwhile James Bond on a bold new assignment.In “Queer,” due Nov. 27 and adapted from a William S. Burroughs novel, Craig plays Lee, an American expat in midcentury Mexico City who becomes enamored with a coolly distant younger man, Allerton (Drew Starkey). Lee is undone by a desire that is reciprocated only in fits and starts, and watching Craig pine so vulnerably packs a pop-cultural punch: Once considered the very face of masculine cool, his visage is now soaked in flop sweat.Though his performance has been earning raves and Oscar chatter since “Queer” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it may surprise fans to see this side of Craig after watching him play a stoic secret agent for the better part of 15 years. But when I asked the director Luca Guadagnino whether “Queer” is closer to his leading man’s actual sensibility than people might have guessed, he replied, “Every movie is a documentary about the actor playing the character.”If that’s the case, maybe now is the perfect time to be reintroduced to Daniel Craig.“I’m not a method actor, but I’m a nightmare to be with when I’m working,” Daniel Craig said of his intense devotion to his work.Thea Traff for The New York Times“SOMETIMES I FIND it very laughable, the idea of maleness,” he said. It was an early morning in October, and I had met Craig for breakfast at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood to ponder the performance of masculinity. “Most men go through life with this act that they do,” he told me. “But it is an act.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Daniel Craig Gets Explicit in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’

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      At the Venice Film Festival, the star said he embraced the scenes with sexual encounters: ‘If I wasn’t in the movie and saw this movie, I’d want to be in it.’If you know Daniel Craig only as James Bond, “Queer” is liable to throw you for a loop. In this new film from Luca Guadagnino, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, Craig, 56, plays a drug addict whose sexual escapades and heroin use are filmed with matter-of-fact candor.But if you knew Craig even before he was pressed into Her Majesty’s Secret Service — when he was still an up-and-coming young actor who appeared in risky, sexually explicit films like “Love Is the Devil” and “The Mother” — then you might guess that “Queer” is much more in line with his sensibilities than some of the big studio fare he’s made recently are. At the film’s Venice news conference, he all but confirmed that hunch.“If I wasn’t in the movie and saw this movie, I’d want to be in it,” Craig told reporters. “It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there. They’re challenging but hopefully incredibly accessible.”Adapted from the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs, “Queer” follows Lee (Craig), an American expat wasting away in Mexico City. Most of Lee’s waking hours are spent pursuing some sort of high, whether that means drinking to excess in dive bars, cruising any handsome man to cross his path, or shooting up heroin while all alone in his apartment.In his linen suits, Lee lurches through life like a well-attired zombie until he meets Allerton (Drew Starkey), a beguiling young drifter whose sexuality seems up for grabs. Does he like Lee or does he just like being liked? Allerton says awfully little, which only beguiles Lee even more. As the older man’s romantic obsession grows, he entices Allerton to help him search for a drug that can supposedly induce a type of telepathy; if it can be scored, maybe he’ll learn what the object of his affection is really thinking.Written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, the Burroughs novel is slight and scuzzy. Guadagnino takes a much different approach to the source material, building lavish sets (this Mexico City was erected at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios) and imbuing the story with a sweeping romanticism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venice Film Festival 2024: What to Watch For

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      “Joker: Folie à Deux,” with Joaquin Phoenix, and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature are on tap. Here are the questions we hope to answer.The 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival kicks off Wednesday with the premiere of Tim Burton’s sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and starry fare will follow, like the sexually provocative Nicole Kidman film “Babygirl” and the George Clooney-Brad Pitt team-up “Wolfs.”Here are four big questions we expect to be answered at the festival, which has long been considered the unofficial kickoff of Oscar season.Will Joaquin Phoenix face the music?A Venice debut for “Joker: Folie à Deux” has been presumed ever since the first “Joker” won the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award five years ago. Can the sequel match that film’s success, which made more than a billion dollars at the box office and landed a best-actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix? The new film adds song-and-dance sequences and a potent co-star in Lady Gaga, so it’s clear that some big swings have been taken.But the “Joker: Folie à Deux” news conference at Venice may be even more keenly awaited than the movie itself now that Phoenix has made headlines for dropping out of a Todd Haynes film just as it was about to start shooting. With the actor potentially facing legal action, will he be willing to take questions about the controversy from reporters? Or will he skip the conference altogether and call to mind Florence Pugh, who famously ditched her Venice press duties for “Don’t Worry Darling” two years ago amid a rumored feud with her director, Olivia Wilde?Can ‘Queer’ and ‘Maria’ make a mark?Two of Venice’s most anticipated titles are still looking for buyers: Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel starring Daniel Craig, and Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” featuring Angelina Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas.After the writers’ and actors’ strikes left many studios’ year-end slates looking awfully barren, you might have expected a bidding frenzy for two prestige films with major stars, but potential distributors that have screened the movies are taking a wait-and-see approach. Splashy premieres at Venice and almost-certain Oscar buzz could help make the sale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ to Compete at Venice Film Festival

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      Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature and new movies from Luca Guadagnino and Pablo Larraín will also debut at this year’s event.“Joker: Folie à Deux,” Todd Phillips’s comic-book sequel starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, will compete for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival.The movie’s participation, which festival organizers announced during a news conference on Tuesday to reveal the lineup, comes five years after Phillips’s “Joker” — which told the Batman villain’s origin story — won the same prize at Venice’s 76th edition, paving the way for its two Oscar wins.Phillips’s movie will face starry competition for the Golden Lion, including from Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door,” starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” a biopic of the opera singer Maria Callas with Angelina Jolie in the lead.Also in competition will be Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” an adaptation of a short novel by William S. Burroughs that follows a drug addict (Daniel Craig) as he undergoes withdrawal in Mexico City and becomes infatuated with an American drifter (Drew Starkey); Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller “Babygirl” starring Nicole Kidman as a manager who starts an affair; and Justin Kurzel’s “The Order,” with Jude Law as an F.B.I. agent investigating a white supremacist terrorist organization.Altogether, 21 movies will compete for the top prize at Venice’s 81st edition, which is scheduled to run Aug. 28 through Sep. 7. A nine-person jury led by Isabelle Huppert, the French actor, will choose the Golden Lion winner, which is announced on the festival’s final day.This year’s competition will include, from top left, “The Room Next Door,” “Maria,” “The Order,” and “Queer.”Iglesias Más; Michelle Faye; Yannis DrakoulidisThis year’s star-studded lineup suggests the impact of last year’s Hollywood strikes on the movie industry’s schedules is waning. Those strikes wrought havoc at last year’s festival, with the MGM studio pulling Guadagnino’s tennis drama “Challengers” from the lineup, and many actors and directors staying away to avoid breaking strike terms.At Tuesday’s news conference, Alberto Barbera, the festival’s artistic director, said that “Joker: Folie à Deux” showed Phoenix and Lady Gaga’s characters stuck in an asylum awaiting trial.“Nobody can imagine what Todd and his screenwriters have imagined,” Barbera said, adding that Phoenix’s performance was “incredible.”Venice’s organizers had announced some of this year’s lineup before Tuesday’s news conference, including this year’s opening movie, which won’t compete for the Golden Lion: “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1988 comedy horror. The new movie has Michael Keaton return to play the title role, and also stars Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara.Another high-profile movie appearing out of competition is Jon Watts’s comedic thriller “Wolfs,” starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt as professional fixers who are hired to cover up the same crime. There are also movies by directors less familiar to Western audiences, including the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, with “Cloud,” and the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, who is showing “April.”In recent years, the Venice Film Festival has gained a reputation for debuting Oscar contenders. Last year, Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” starring Emma Stone, won the Golden Lion for best film and Stone went on to win best actress at this year’s Academy Awards. More

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      ‘Challengers’ and That Ending: Our Critics Have Thoughts

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      The tennis movie comes to an abrupt stop midmatch, so we don’t know who won. Does that matter?The relationships in “Challengers” are complicated. Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) were close pals on the juniors tennis circuit when they met Tashi (Zendaya), a phenom. As the years pass and they become entangled in on-court rivalry and off-court sexual tensions, the film builds to a vicious challenger-circuit match between Art, now a top-ranked pro with a confidence problem, and Patrick, sleeping in his car between tournaments. In the stands is Art’s wife and Patrick’s ex, Tashi, who turned to coaching after an injury cut short her career. The film ends abruptly, the outcome of the match unclear — and that has been the subject of much discussion online. So we asked our critic at large Wesley Morris and our movie critic Alissa Wilkinson to weigh in. Caution: Spoilers ahead.WESLEY MORRIS Alissa, we’re here to discuss the final moments of “Challengers,” and in order to do that, I’m committing a big personal no-no and talking about a movie that people have had only two weeks to see. Sometimes it takes me — a culture professional — a while to catch up, so I’d imagine other folks might appreciate some distance between opening weekend and the instant media chatterboxes start breaking down the dismount. I also understand that’s a very 1988 flavor of film discourse and that a judge would overrule me.So: People are confused about this ending? Or intrigued? Either way, I ask: Which part? The storm of final shots (final camera shots) that boot us out of the theater midmatch? Or the final encounter between Tashi and Patrick, which I refuse to ruin? Or her final glimpse, on match eve, of a sleeping Art?If we’re talking about that shot storm, which goes down in a third-set tiebreaker between Patrick and Art, is it so intriguing that it warrants a conversation? There’s one image of Patrick crouching and another of Art aloft, mid-slam, that I’ll always remember. What follows? Eh. I don’t know who these characters are, who they’re supposed to be, or what they might want, even secretly. So I didn’t care what happens after this match.If anything concerned me, it was the fact that this finale takes place in the middle (or the end, I suppose) of the third point of the tiebreaker, which has at least four or five more points to go. Is caring who wins the match gauche? Is it safe to assume that, based on the number of warnings and penalties the exasperated chair umpire (Darnell Appling) Frisbees out, whatever’s happening in that final scene is the end of the match anyway, because one of these guys is getting ejected? Did I just wind up re-enacting what people are doing with this movie anyway and express genuine intrigue?Josh O’Connor as a down-on-his-luck pro in the film.MGMWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Luca Guadagnino’s Key Musical Moments in “Challengers” and More Films

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      Hear songs from “Challengers,” “Call Me by Your Name” and more.From left: Mike Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in “Challengers.”Metro Goldwyn Mayer PicturesDear listeners,This week I saw Luca Guadagnino’s much-hyped tennis love-triangle movie “Challengers” — like a lot of people, it seems. And also like a lot of people, including The Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, I had a good time at the movies. This film “isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief,” Dargis writes in her astute review. “It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.” She also characterizes Guadagnino, correctly I think, as a filmmaker adept at “blissfully gliding along the surfaces of life.”Throughout his career, Guadagnino has used music as a crucial tool in creating those slick surfaces. His first film to charm me was the lush 2015 drama “A Bigger Splash,” which features Tilda Swinton playing a rock star and Ralph Fiennes doing an ecstatic and very memorable dance to the Rolling Stones’ “Emotional Rescue.”Dance sequences recur throughout Guadagnino’s filmography, often as opportunities for bodies and desires to collide, and whether it’s a bunch of young people bopping to the Psychedelic Furs in his great 2017 romance, “Call Me by Your Name,” or Zendaya and her friends getting down to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” during a flashback scene in “Challengers,” the accompanying song choices feel authentic. In both of those scenes, Guadagnino isn’t looking for the most obscure needle drop, but a song that would convincingly get those characters on the dance floor in the particular cultural moment he is creating.“Challengers” got me thinking back to all the great musical moments in Guadagnino’s films, and before I knew it, I was compiling this playlist. It features a few of the aforementioned moments, along with original songs composed for his movies from the likes of Thom Yorke and Sufjan Stevens, and a selection from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping and prismatic “Challengers” score, which I have been listening to all week. I highly recommend it if you would like every moment of your life — washing the dishes, dashing for the subway, writing a newsletter — to feel like a high-stakes tennis match.Also! I’m out next week but will be leaving you in the capable hands of two special guest playlisters. Till then!Not like the other girls,LindsayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How They Served the Tennis Scenes in ‘Challengers’

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      Painstaking effort went into building the energetic competition moments in Luca Guadagnino’s love-triangle tennis drama. Here’s a closer look at the process.“Let’s not make a tennis film.”That was the director Luca Guadagnino’s unconventional approach to “Challengers,” the hit movie starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor as rival tennis aces, locked in a high-stakes love triangle.Guadagnino, the Italian director known for his deft eroticism (“Call Me By Your Name”), didn’t want it to look like tennis usually does, with a static camera positioned behind the player who is serving, or a wide shot of the court. “That kind of televisual stillness — there’s objectivity,” he said, “which is exactly the opposite of what I was going after.”Instead, he wanted the action to mirror the characters’ complicated and sweaty dynamic — for viewers to feel like they were inside the competition, which is as much metaphor as sport. “We were asking ourselves all the time, are we really giving a kinetic experience, an intimate experience, for an audience? And are we translating that into something that can emotionally resonate?” he said in a recent video interview.But when production started, Guadagnino was a neophyte: “I was completely ignorant about tennis,” he said. Perhaps that’s why he was able to envision unique shots, like one that is below the net, or another where the camera is the ball, giving a spinning view as it hurtles across the court.Revved by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno score, the visuals are naturalism on overdrive. But even with an assist from special effects, the tennis proved hard to shoot; the 10-minute finale game took eight months to produce. It was, Guadagnino said, “a very, very, very laborious movie.”In separate video interviews, Guadagnino, the Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Brad Gilbert, the American tennis pro turned coach and commentator, who served as a consultant on the film, explained how they created the vigorous love-set-match moments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watch Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor Spar Over Churros in ‘Challengers’

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      The director Luca Guadagnino narrates a tense scene between the two characters.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Churros have never tasted more bitter than in this scene from “Challengers.”In this sequence, which takes place at Stanford, the character Art (Mike Faist), who is attending the university, reconnects with his dear friend Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who has left education to become a tennis pro. Not present in the scene, yet hanging over it, is Tashi (Zendaya), the woman at the center of their complicated triangle.At this moment, Tashi is dating Patrick, but in this scene, Art is trying to throw a wrench into the relationship. The sequence takes place at the university canteen where the two are chatting over churros. Narrating the sequence, the director Luca Guadagnino said that what is playing out is “a game of rivalry sparkling between these two young boys over Tashi, but at the same time, a jealousy that ignites the relationship also because, probably, these two guys are also jealous of one another.”That tension is played out in the way that Guadagnino shoots the sequence, holding on a long two-shot as the friends discuss Tashi, then cutting when Patrick realizes the game of manipulation that Art is playing.“The main guideline in thinking of this movie and the mise en scène was the classic old Hollywood screwball comedy kind of grammar,” Guadagnino said. “Those great movies were all using, in a beautiful way, the stillness of framing to let the performance breathe in all its ambiguities, in all its unspoken conflicts.”Read the “Challengers” review.Read an interview with the stars of the film.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More