Daniel Craig is ‘transfixing’ and ‘brilliant’ in ‘Queer,’ according to critics out of Venice Film Festival

Daniel Montgomery
·3 min read
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“Queer” premiered in competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival on September 3. The highly anticipated film is the second this year from director Luca Guadagnino, who earlier this year released the provocative tennis drama “Challengers.” This one stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, a pseudonym of author William S. Burroughs, who lives in Mexico City and is drawn to a younger man named Allerton (Drew Starkey). It has been picked up by A24 for US distribution.

So far aggregator MetaCritic has logged 13 reviews of the film, which overall gets a “generally favorable” rating of 75. But the individual reviews are somewhat divided: eight are positive and five are mixed, though none are outright negative. On Rotten Tomatoes, where films are classified simply as positive or negative, the film is 80% fresh based on 10 reviews, just two of which give the film a thumbs down.

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On the positive end of the spectrum, David Rooney (Hollywood Reporter) calls the film “mesmerizing” and Craig’s performance “transfixing” in how it “balances colorful affectation with raw hunger.” Ryan Lattanzio (IndieWire) thinks it’s “profound” and “kaleidoscopic,” while “Craig’s brilliant performance is all inner torment he wears on the outside as a deeply lonely man doomed to an unrequited all-consuming love, funny and tragic in his inability to help himself.” Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) similarly gushes about Craig’s “excellent performance,” which is “needy, horny, moody, like his ‘Knives Out‘ detective Benoit Blanc on steroids and with something of his portrayal of Ted Hughes from 2003’s ‘Sylvia.'”

Fionnuala Halligan (Screen Daily) thinks the film “excels” in “the push-and-pull of the relationship between Lee and Allerton, played beautifully by both actors,” though “for a Burroughs adaptation, it has all the provocation but none of the haunting power that ‘Naked Lunch’ still holds, almost 35 years later.” Nicholas Barber (BBC) is also on the Daniel Craig bandwagon, calling him “easily the best thing” about the film, but he too has reservations about “Queer” as a whole: “Considering how unpredictable this narrative is, you couldn’t say the film was boring, exactly, but you couldn’t say it was gripping.”

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The critical assessments of Guadagnino’s films have varied greatly over the years, with his most acclaimed effort being another queer literary adaptation, the romance “Call Me by Your Name” (94 on MetaCritic). The current score for “Queer” puts it in the ballpark of 2015’s “A Bigger Splash” and 2022’s “Bones and All” (74 for both films), neither of which contended for Oscars. But “Queer” may be a stronger awards play based on the near-unanimous praised heaped upon Daniel Craig, an actor who is yet to receive an Oscar nomination, but who is due after decades in the industry in iconic roles like James Bond and the aforementioned Benoit Blanc.

Craig has proved himself in projects big and small, so after finally passing on the Bond role to the next portrayer, he’s just one right role away from striking gold. We saw a similar trajectory last year when Robert Downey Jr. got his Oscar coronation for “Oppenheimer” after more than a decade as “Iron Man.” When you make the industry tons of money, that industry often shows its gratitude when you then show off your dramatic chops (see also: Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich,” Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side”). Will it be the same kind of celebration for Craig?

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