Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is a daring, dreamlike exploration of unrequited desire, dislocation, and descent—part period drama, part psychedelic fever dream. Adapted from William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella, the film is both an homage to its author’s troubled psyche and a contemporary reflection on queer longing, filtered through Guadagnino’s lush, maximalist style. It’s one of the strangest and most transfixing films of 2024—and perhaps the most vulnerable performance Daniel Craig has ever delivered. Set in the smoky bars and humid streets of 1950s Mexico City, Queer centers on William Lee, an aging American expat living in exile and chasing the ghosts of intimacy through drugs and fleeting encounters. Craig plays Lee with a quiet desperation, a man whose intellectual bravado masks deep insecurity and emotional decay. When he meets Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a younger and inscrutable fellow American, something inside Lee ignites—an obsession that spirals slowly into ...