There are few droll joys in cinema more satisfying than watching and hearing George Clooney and Brad Pitt exchange knowing looks and wry, occasionally pointed banter. They’ve appeared in several films together, but the camaraderie stuff mainly happens in the “Ocean’s” caper films directed by Steven Soderbergh. (In the Coen Brothers’ 2008 “Burn After Reading,” to name one of their other on-screen collaborations, the relationship between their characters does not, spoiler alert, survive their non-introduction.) There are no more such films on anyone’s docket, but “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts, does, despite its nameless main characters having a largely antagonistic kind of kinship, work hard to give its stars some of that old Danny and Rusty feeling.

Watts deliberately, and almost ceaselessly, plays on these performers’ status as the Last White Male Movie Stars, and even more so as the Last White Aging Male Movie Stars. (Their characters don’t move as quickly as they did when they wore younger men’s clothes, and late in the film they take to sharing an Advil bottle.) Pitt and Clooney play cleaners for hire—not the dry kind but the criminal kind. When an ambitious politico played by Amy Ryan has a luxury hotel assignation that ends with a probable corpse in her hotel room, she phones a contact listed on her device only as a pair of brackets. And then along comes George, black turtleneck sweatered, with a nice leather coat, some latex gloves, and other tools of his trade. But he is followed in short order by a similarly dressed Brad, summoned by the owners of the hotel. And the two soon start low-key bickering about who’s going to do the lion’s share of the cleaning while poor Ryan has to blubber with a bloody blouse for a while.

Despite a spectacular supporting cast that also includes the great Richard Kind, and some voice work by Frances McDormand, “Wolfs” is a duet in cool for its two principals, at least up until the problem they were arguing over the cleaning of proves more animated than had been previously believed. Austin Abrams plays a character known only as “Kid,” and he’s simultaneously terrified and awed by the men who are in charge of his fate. The proceedings are further enlivened by four bricks of heroin-or-something-like-it (some of the more amusing banter has the Wolfs arguing about the possibility of a “magic drug”) and some murderous Albanians who are looking for those bricks. The various plot twists and attempted escapes yield a bravura multi-borough New York chase scene that could have been trimmed by a couple of minutes but definitely represents a coup for the picture’s location coordinator David Fox and his crew, and kudos to them. And while there’s a fair amount of grisly violence here (something Watts is no stranger to; the fact that he directed the trashy, amoral horror film “Clown” gave me some misgivings about this enterprise), it’s more cartoonish than anything else.

This is neither a trifle nor a truly Major Motion Picture; it’s an entertainment maybe in the sense that Graham Greene used the term. But one needn’t be so hifalutin about the matter. Fact is, it’s a smile to hear Clooney utter again the familiar line “What’s the play here?” and Pitt protest, a little later on, “I don’t work that way.” And deep-cut appreciators will appreciate the mini-homage to “Ocean’s” producer Jerry Weintraub in the form of a late-introduced character who’s a Sinatra super fan.

This review was filed from the premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It opens on September 20th.

The jazzy experimental style of the Beat Generation writers has made their work notoriously tricky to adapt for the screen. Walter Salles’ On the Road, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch took stabs at it with varying degrees of success. John Krokidas’ under-appreciated Kill Your Darlings arguably came closer to capturing the rebellious energy of the literary movement by tracing a formative episode in the lives of the writers themselves. In Queer, Luca Guadagnino meets William S. Burroughs on the iconoclast’s own slippery terms and the result is mesmerizing.

Working again with Justin Kuritzkes, his screenwriter on Challengers, Guadagnino paints an evocative picture of ex-pat ennui in post-World War II Mexico City, establishing the foundations of a love story grounded in realism before shifting into fantasy as the narrative becomes a drug-addled mosaic. The film was acquired ahead of its Venice premiere by A24, which is planning a release later this year.

Written in the early ‘50s while Burroughs was awaiting trial for the allegedly accidental homicide of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, but not published until 1985, the novel is practically a memoir, given how closely it hews to events in the author’s diaries and letters.

The book sits squarely between Junkie and Naked Lunch in chronicling the experiences with opioid addiction of Burroughs’ alter ego, William Lee. But Queer perhaps is the most revealing of the three books about the writer himself, depicting Lee’s unraveling, possessed by desire and corrosive need. The object of that obsession is Eugene Allerton, a fresh-faced American ex-military kid inspired by Adelbert Lewis Marker, who was 21 when he and Burroughs met.

It’s hard to think of a more ideal director than Guadagnino to explore queerness, sensuality and the shifting terrain of romantic intoxication, and he’s found the perfect traveling companion in Daniel Craig. In a transfixing performance that balances colorful affectation with raw hunger, the actor makes Lee a magnetic raconteur whose shield of worldly composure falls away as Eugene (Drew Starkey) eludes his grasp, leaving him a virtual ghost by the end of the film.

In Mexico City to escape charges of heroin possession in the U.S., Lee indulges his drug habit with whatever he can get, while trying to write but more often spending time strolling the streets, drinking in a charged atmosphere of brothels and cock fights and bars captured in granular panoramic splendor by DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.

Aside from some second-unit work, the movie was shot entirely at Cinecittà, with sets constructed on the historic Rome studio backlot. (Queer marks the second major film this year to recreate Mexico on European soundstages, following Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez.)

Lee is a fixture at the Ship Ahoy bar, floating among the queer American ex-patriate community but maintaining a real friendship seemingly only with Joe, who’s unwilling to give up his taste for rough trade over anything as inconsequential as getting assaulted or robbed. Played by an unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman, Joe could almost be an Allen Ginsberg surrogate, spinning low-key hilarious accounts of his sexual adventures. When a dalliance with a cop turns sour and he finds “El Puto Gringo” scrawled on an exterior wall of his home, he shrugs, “I left it there. It pays to advertise.”

Lee pulls his share of young tricks, both Americans and Mexicans, but when lanky, bespectacled Eugene catches his eye on the street, he’s bewitched. At first, their flirtatious glances are a playful cat-and-mouse game. Lee strikes out in his initial attempts to connect, but Eugene gradually starts fraternizing with him at bars.

They go to a movie theater to see Cocteau’s Orpheus, where Guadagnino finds a gorgeous visual translation for Burroughs’ description of Lee as he imagines caressing and kissing Eugene, with “ectoplasmic fingers” and “phantom thumbs.” Also lifted directly from the novel is a moving image soon after, when Lee in his mind leans in close to the younger man, appearing “curiously spectral, as though you could see through his face.”

Though the connection does eventually extend to the physical, it’s more a question of Lee servicing Eugene and the latter surprising him by reciprocating, albeit with impersonal detachment. While Eugene is sufficiently bi-curious to express interest in the gay bars around town, there’s no indication that he’s had sex with men before, or that he enjoys it. But Lee perseveres, convincing him to accompany him to South America, covering all costs and bargaining for intimacy once or twice a week.

Burroughs purists might scoff, but it lends credibility and warmth to the trajectory of this transactional relationship that Guadagnino and Kuritzkes have sanded down some of Lee’s more abrasive edges from the novel — his patronizing attitudes toward Mexicans for one. Craig looks both seedy and elegant, louche and dashing in his linen suits and fedora. You can understand a youth being dazzled by Lee’s “routines,” flavorful anecdotes full of seductive conversational flourishes.

While Craig makes this loquacious side of the character highly entertaining, he’s also superb at showing Lee’s unaccustomed self-exposure, his aching need for human contact increasing his vulnerability as his addiction to Eugene becomes chronic. With illuminating new self-knowledge comes crippling weakness, something Craig fully conveys in a ballsy performance covering a broad psychological and emotional spectrum.

Once they depart Mexico, drug withdrawals leave Lee weak and shivering, clinging to every tenuous sign that Eugene cares for him. Playing a withholding character, Starkey deftly keeps an air of mystery around that question though he never risks being perceived as a mere user. Despite being ambivalent about the sex, his irritation is tempered by compassion for hopelessly consumed Lee. The actor quietly sizzles in the high-waisted trousers and knit shirts of the time; Eugene wears his preppy wardrobe with a natural panache about which he seems oblivious.

The purpose of the South America trip is to find a plant-derived hallucinogen called yagé, more commonly known as ayahuasca, which Lee believes can trigger powers of telepathic divination. This takes them into the Ecuadorian jungle to meet wildly eccentric, stringy-haired American botanist Dr. Cotter, who lives in a hut with her younger male companion (Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso) and a sloth. (Another of Guadagnino’s directing contemporaries, David Lowery, appears earlier as one of Lee’s bar acquaintances.)

The botanist is played to the hilt by Lesley Manville (also unrecognizable), feral and ferocious, packing a pistol lest anyone try to make off with her precious research material. Lee assures her in his disarming way that they just want to sample the brew, which she warns them is a mirror, not a portal to another place.

Psychedelic tripping scenes in movies often tend to be embarrassing. But Guadagnino knows what he’s doing, folding together body horror elements reminiscent of his Suspiria remake — if you want to see two men literally vomit up their hearts, you’re in the right place — with an almost balletic union between Lee and Eugene that’s as spiritual as it is carnal.

Cotter encourages them to stick around and see where more of the drug could take them, but they decline. As they leave, she tells Eugene: “The door is already open. You can’t close it.” Those cryptic words hang in the air of a haunting epilogue with Lee back in Mexico City two years later, in which the images of Eugene in his head become enmeshed with Burroughs’ own traumatic history with Vollmer.

This is Guadagnino’s fourth collaboration with gifted Thai cinematographer Mukdeeprom; it’s heady and beautiful, finding dreamy visual poetry even in tawdriness and squalor. The air seems pervaded by palpable strains of both sensuality and desolation. The period production and costume design (respectively Stefano Baisi and Jonathan Anderson) clearly have been meticulously curated but have a lived-in feel that gives the movie as much grit as elegance.

After their pounding beats energized Challengers, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross shift gears with a score drenched in melancholy feeling, shaping the mood along with invigorating blasts of non-period tracks by New Order, Nirvana, Sinéad O’Connor and Prince, among others. Those bold choices are typical of Guadagnino’s sure hand throughout this strange, beguiling film, fueled by tenderness, loneliness, lust and swooning unrequited love.

A hybrid musical-docu-biopic Lego movie like “Piece by Piece” is a rich concept. The bright jubilation of “Happy,” the chart-topping hit for producer/musician Pharrell Williams, would presumably make his life story and the form of animation a perfect fit. Williams’ playful, genre-bending music that mixes post-soul cool with skater sensibilities is probably more than a live-action narrative could contain. In the hands of director Morgan Neville, however, the story of Williams’ life lacks specificity and substance.

Neville leans on the kind of visual storytelling common to documentary film, his bread and butter, throughout “Piece by Piece.” The opening, for instance, borrows the aesthetic language of behind-the-scenes documentaries by having a camera following behind a Lego Pharrell (voicing himself) as he walks into his home. The singer asks his wife Helen to quiet the kids because he’s about to be interviewed. Pharrell and the camera go to a separate room, where two chairs are set up: one for him and another for a Lego version of Neville. The filmmaker then prompts the star to tell his life story—inspiring Pharrell to imagine himself as a baby sea creature swimming through the ocean toward the Roman god of the sea Neptune. That dreamed origin story pushes us to the shores of Virginia Beach, Pharrell’s hometown, where he lives in the Atlantis projects with his mother and father. 

From then on, the film takes a rise-and-fall-and-rise format. At his grammar school, Pharrell connects with Pusha T, Missy Elliot, Timbaland, and his eventual Neptunes collaborators Chad Hugo and Shay Haley. The band impresses superstar music producer Teddy Riley, inspiring Williams and Hugo to maximize their creative potential. It leads to collaborations with Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake and more. The plethora of hits, of course, lends the film its jukebox appeal. But visually, Neville, uninspiringly just recreates the music videos for “Hollaback Girl” and “Drop It Like It’s Hot” as Legos. The success Pharrell experiences becomes the primary conflict as he stretches himself too thin as a hitmaker and as the head of fashion and product lines.

It’s all pretty ho-hum. Biopics, especially with the subject’s involvement, are always sanitized. Despite the film’s love of oft-bleeped expletives, “Piece by Piece” is far too clean. Pharrell’s two main character flaws in this film add up to: I’m too trusting and yet I’m afraid of commitment. The former gets him in trouble with A&R men sanding down his musical complexity. The latter occurs in his music, jumping from genre to genre, and in his personal life, with his girlfriend and eventual wife. These aren’t uninteresting obstacles. But they can’t be the sum-total of a person’s complexity. Rather Neville emphasizes Pharrell’s faith in God, his devotion to his friends—such as helping a down-on-his-luck Pusha T score a hit—and his seemingly boundless creativity as the main talking points. 

Those aims leave many other narrative questions unanswered. Neville and Pharrell make it a point that the Neptunes were locked in a music deal with Teddy Riley, but it’s never explained how the group were able to break out of that deal once they found representation. Pharrell’s parents appear as comic relief, but not much else is revealed about them. Pharrell’s songwriting process is also likened to his putting together Lego pieces until they shine a la the lightbulb above a great idea. Nothing else, however, is said of his actual methodology or ethos. 

Most of all, the film rarely finds inventive ways to talk about Pharrell’s inner life. Sequences where the artist’s synesthesia are represented onscreen are the exception, roaring as vibrant, blooming hues of hypnotic color. There are other whimsical moments, such as a statue of Neptune coming alive or Pharrell imagining himself being left out at sea by nefarious A&R men, but this film is never as playful as it’d like you to believe. 

Rather the overstretched and underthought “Piece by Piece” is always struggling to check the boxes of its genre requirements: the musical sequences lack originality, the Lego animation doesn’t go beyond the expected sheen, the biopic elements are too controled and the humor is intermittent. It’s also unclear who exactly this movie is for? With its heavy expletives it’s certainly not for kids. And with it being animated, you wonder how many adults will gravitate toward a movie trying to straddle the line between winking and clean. There are simply too many chunks missing from “Piece by Piece” for it to be as memorable as its subject.   

This review was filed from the premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The film opens on October 11, 2024.