Kritiken

Queer is a bold act of kindness from one queer to another, excavating an unexpected and impossible love story out from one of our most enigmatic homosexual touchstones. It is a rare gem, haunting and strange, a romance of shivering ache and heartbreak.

[Craig's] is a hell of a performance, and it meshes sublimely with Guadagnino’s ability to capture a bit of gonzo beat-gen tone, mixing arch visual sensibilities with his trademark earnest explorations of love, love in this case being the blossom of a plant with roots that’ll make your skin melt and your eyes see through the cosmos.

[Queer is] a marvel of a movie that feels as if it is precisely what it intends to be, and yet it's ultimately unsatisfying. Perhaps that's intended too?

Queer rambles a bit, especially in comparison to Guadagnino’s most plot-driven movies — the biggest issue is a narrative in need of a slightly stronger spine... That issue aside, Craig’s performance on its own is worth the price of admission, and if nothing else Guadagnino really knows how to transport the viewer to a completely different place and time from today.

Queer hopefully signals a return to proper drama for Daniel Craig. He dives into the part, and his ventures pay off... The figure we see here vibrates with pain. Young and horribly twisted out of shape by his own energies, this is a great performance, a twitchy two-hour canvas of soul-baring in Hades.

If it was Guadagnino’s ambition to have his audience feel, literally, Lee’s sense of unease and alienation, he has accomplished this. Whether that makes Queer an enjoyable film is less clear. But maybe that’s the point.

Most gay affairs on screen suffer from an excess of good taste... What distinguishes Craig’s performance is how convincingly he communicates the fever of longing to which Lee is condemned the moment he lays eyes on Allerton... They leave bruises that look like they ache. That’s what Guadagnino has made a movie about: that ache.

Queer breaks new artistic ground for an artist whose visionary talent is already well established... Brimming with sumptuous sensuality and emotional intelligence, Queer is both a cinematic feast and an alluring aperitif that leaves one feeling richly sated yet somehow also wanting more, more.

Guadagnino has followed up this year’s triumphant tennis drama Challengers with a film that would seem miles apart, yet treats desire equally as a kind of supernatural possession... [Burroughs's source novella is] a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author’s life.

Beautifully written by Justin Kuritzkes... Queer is a sad and sordid portrait of a life derailed by addiction and bigotry that’s dryly and sometimes farcically funny. It’s shot through with empathy courtesy of Craig’s impressively nuanced, visibly vulnerable turn.

Craig is fantastic as Lee, the [film's] crumpled, love-starved, swaggering hero... He has long shown an interest in sexually ambiguous roles, and here he is able to explore that with sensitivity, humour, and free-wheeling open-endedness.

If Queer looks more like a loosely-assembled collection of drug-addled nightmares than a coherent narrative, Craig manages to dominate the screen throughout.