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Review: A reinvented Daniel Craig burrows into the heart of a lonely expat in 'Queer'

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Review: A reinvented Daniel Craig burrows into the heart of a lonely expat in 'Queer'

If director Luca Guadagnino has proven anything during his remarkable 2024, it’s that he is the preeminent depicter of erotic desire on-screen. His sexy spring sensation “Challengers” became a phenomenon with its hot-under-the-collar tennis matches, and he’s assembled the same group of collaborators for the surreal and sweaty “Queer,” an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella written in 1952 and published in 1985.

On the surface, “Queer” seems to be miles away from the shiny, sporty thrills of “Challengers,” but in execution, both are pure expressions of cinematic sensuality and the subconscious. But whereas “Challengers” finds its horny friction in repression, control and repetition, “Queer” is a sprawling, sometimes grotesque fever dream of chaos. It is messy and it doesn’t totally cohere (just how those Beat forefathers liked it), but it does stick to a guiding principle of yearning, expressed in achingly poignant, unforgettable moments of sound and image.

Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (also of “Challengers”) has adapted “Queer” for the screen and Daniel Craig stars as William Lee, the Burroughs stand-in, a writer of some means killing time and getting drunk in Mexico in the early 1950s among a group of gay American expats (Jason Schwartzman, Drew Droege, Ariel Schulman). One night he spies Eugene (Drew Starkey) in one of the greatest character introductions of all time — strolling in slow motion past a cockfight set to Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” — and becomes instantly obsessed with the mysterious and handsome young man.

“Queer” is about many things, including the consumption of an unholy amount of mind-altering substances, but first and foremost it is about the absolute embarrassment of being stricken with an all-consuming crush. Craig’s performance is fantastic, baring body and soul, but he is specifically great at the fumbling, awkward choices Lee makes in front of Eugene: a jokey little bow that doesn’t go over well, talking too much and too fast, getting drunk and falling down in front of his friends. He is too needy, too touchy, too wanting of Eugene’s attention, which is doled out sparingly.

Starkey, best known for the Netflix teen drama “Outer Banks,” terrifically inhabits this breakout role, playing Eugene as an inherently unknowable object of desire, because that is what he is to Lee. With his background in military intelligence, Eugene is a cipher, allowing people to project whatever they desire onto him. His sexuality is unclear and seemingly opportunistic. In a film about wanting, he leaves Lee in such a state that it haunts the man for the rest of his life.

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The pair set off for the Amazon in search of a magical drug known as yagé (or ayahuasca), Lee determined to use it to achieve telepathy. What he wants is to achieve a true, tender connection with Eugene, a channel of clear communication, even if he might be disappointed by what he ultimately hears.

Visually and sonically, “Queer” is a textured, evocative piece about moments of heady anticipation — a high we get to chase as viewers. There is no drug that could equal the intoxicating power in the cling of a white undershirt or the angle of a throat straining for a kiss. There is no high greater than the person you want draping their leg over yours in bed. Lee chases sex, drugs and telepathy, but what he’s chasing isn’t sex itself, but the moments beforehand.

No one captures that better than Guadagnino and his team, including cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and editor Marco Costa. Production designer Stefano Baisi has recreated 1950s Mexico (or the memory of it) on Italian soundstages, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross contribute a score that keens and wheedles, blending with the anachronistic pop soundtrack and diegetic music.

But it’s Jonathan Anderson’s costume design that takes your breath away. The creative director for the Spanish fashion house Loewe, Anderson outfits the loose-limbed Starkey in appropriately tattered polos and perfectly tailored trousers, Craig in Burroughs’ signature linen suit and spectacles. The costumes are an inherent part of the storytelling, from huarache sandals that Schwartzman turns into a punchline, to flamboyant embellishments on the suits of Droege’s Dumé.

The context of Burroughs writing “Queer” is unspeakably tragic and Guadagnino refers to those real-life details without making the film a biopic. He’s more concerned with the character’s state of mind, which is troubled, addled from drugs and booze, and driven almost mad with yearning.

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If the film is too long (and it is), it still achieves something indelible because despite its hallucinatory flights of fancy, it remains rooted in deeply human emotion. Of all the memorable images, none are quite so affecting as those two pairs of legs on a bed. That’s all we really want, right?

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

‘Queer’

Rated: R, for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, strong drug content, language and brief violence

Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

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Playing: In limited release Wednesday, Nov. 27

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA

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Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA is shared with the audience by investigator Steve Sue in a calm and charming manner, but this documentary tells a powerful, positive and fascinating story. The “hang loose” thumb, pinky sign that originated in Hawaii and carries many meanings is the focus of this film. I just learned this gesture is called a “Shaka” and has a worldwide impact.  And, there are Shaka Contests.  Who knew? And how do you throw a Shaka? For me, […]
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Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day

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Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day

Victoria Jones, the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, was reportedly found dead at a hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.

According to TMZ, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to a medical emergency call at the Fairmont San Francisco early Thursday morning. The paramedics pronounced Victoria dead at the scene before turning it over to the San Francisco Police Department for further investigation, the outlet said.

An SFPD representative confirmed to The Times that officers responded to a call at approximately 3:14 a.m. Thursday regarding a report of a deceased person at the hotel and that they met with medics at the scene who declared an unnamed adult female dead.

Citing law enforcement sources, NBC Bay Area also reported that the deceased woman found in a hallway of the hotel was believed to be Jones and that police did not suspect foul play.

“We are deeply saddened by an incident that occurred at the hotel on January 1, 2026,” the Fairmont told NBC Bay Area in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences are with the family and loved ones during this very difficult time. The hotel team is actively cooperating and supporting police authorities within the framework of the ongoing investigation.”

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The medical examiner conducted an investigation at the scene, but Jones’ cause of death remains undetermined. Dispatch audio obtained by TMZ and People indicated that the 911 emergency call was for a suspected drug overdose.

Jones was the daughter of Tommy Lee and ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley. Her brief acting career included roles on films such as “Men in Black II” (2002), which starred her father, and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005), which was directed by her father. She also appeared in a 2005 episode of “One Tree Hill.”

Page Six reported that Jones had been arrested at least twice in 2025 in Napa County, including an arrest on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and drug possession.

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Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me

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Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me

Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.

“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”

The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.

But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.

Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.

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“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.

“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.

“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.

“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.

And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.

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Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.

Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.

The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.

Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.

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“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.

Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.

But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.

And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

star

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs

Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis

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Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:43

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine

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