Queer is Luca Guadagnino's deeply intimate adaptation of William S. Burroughs' semi-autobiographical novella, set in 1950s Mexico City among a colony of American expatriates. Daniel Craig delivers what many consider the finest performance of his career as William Lee, a lonely middle-aged expat who becomes obsessively infatuated with a younger man named Allison, played with cool magnetic ambiguity by Drew Starkey. Guadagnino transforms Burroughs' raw prose into a film of extraordinary visual beauty and psychological depth, capturing the ache of unrequited longing with the same precision he brought to Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All.

The film explores desire, addiction, and the terror of genuine connection through Guadagnino's signature blend of sensuality and melancholy. Craig disappears completely into the role, stripping away all traces of his most famous character to inhabit a man whose vulnerability feels utterly unguarded. The screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes captures the hallucinatory quality of Burroughs' writing while grounding it in the mundane loneliness of exile — bars, cheap hotels, and endless afternoons with nothing but longing to fill them.

Queer premiered at the Venice Film Festival to rapturous critical acclaim, earning Craig widespread awards consideration and cementing Guadagnino's reputation as one of cinema's most essential voices. The film represents a major artistic risk — Burroughs' source material was long considered unfilmable — and its success is a testament to both director and lead's willingness to pursue emotional truth without compromise. It streams on Amazon Prime Video as one of the most daring prestige films of the decade's first half.