Queer
| Release Date: November 27, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
72
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 50 Critic Reviews
Positive:
34
Mixed:
16
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 3, 2024
In Queer, Luca Guadagnino meets William S. Burroughs on the iconoclast’s own slippery terms and the result is mesmerizing. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 3, 2024
Queer doesn’t scrimp on provocation and pleasure, but it’s also a beautiful film about male loneliness, and the way a solitary life can so easily shade into a life sentence. Read full review
100
IndieWireRyan LattanzioSep 3, 2024
Guadagnino wants not only to expand your consciousness as a moviegoer, but to cut you open and rearrange all the parts of you that see and feel things when you watch a film at all. Read full review
91
Original-CinChris KnightDec 12, 2024
Craig is easily the best thing in Queer, which grows a little maudlin at the end. Burroughs himself never properly completed the story, having lost interest along the way. But that’s not to say that his performance is the sole reason to see it. Read full review
90
Vanity FairRichard LawsonSep 4, 2024
Queer is meant to be prickly, withholding, enigmatic. To want anything more from it might simply be repeating Lee’s mistake, grasping for something that could never be ours. Read full review
88
Washington PostTy BurrDec 5, 2024
A book that got under the young Guadagnino’s skin, about the ache to merge with a forbidden lover’s body and soul, has become a film that uses the play of light on a screen to hint at the light we carry inside ourselves and that only the queer know we share. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzNov 27, 2024
It also serves up a smorgasbord of explicit homoerotic imagery, surrealism and ambiguity at a time when Western culture seems to be stampeding towards 1950s prurience, fascist-scented literal-mindedness, and corporate self-censorship, "Queer" is a film out of its time in just about every way. That's what's invigorating about it. Read full review
85
SlashfilmJeremy MathaiOct 10, 2024
Whether this atypical Burroughs adaptation and unconventional love story truly works for you in the end or not, you won't regret getting swept up in the journey. Read full review
83
ConsequenceLiz Shannon MillerNov 26, 2024
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. With his films, the cliche has never been more true: The journey is the destination. Read full review
80
Film ThreatPerry NortonFeb 5, 2025
Craig is terrific. Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyDec 13, 2024
It’s a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author’s life. Read full review
80
iChristina NewlandDec 13, 2024
It rewards the viewer with a sense of the vast beauty – and sadness – a fleeting love affair might provide. It’s a brief thing, maybe, but it also lasts a lifetime. Read full review
80
Little White LiesHannah StrongDec 12, 2024
Burroughs believed in magic, and watching Queer, one has an inkling that Guadagnino does too. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzDec 5, 2024
At 2 hours and 17 minutes, the film is a little bloated, though the expansiveness and inventiveness of the filmmaking make that sound like complaining about too much dessert. Read full review
80
The New York TimesManohla DargisNov 28, 2024
[Lee] may have been Guadagnino-ized, and much about what makes him tick, his past and his art, remains obscured. Yet in Craig’s ravaged charisma you do see someone who’s ready to blow open other doors of perception. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesKatie WalshNov 28, 2024
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. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneDavid FearSep 10, 2024
It truly is a solid match of moviemaker and source material. Yet none of this would work as well as it does without Craig. Read full review
80
TheWrapBen CrollSep 9, 2024
Though adapted from the book (and life) of William S. Burroughs, this carnal film builds just as much on the filmmaker’s ongoing interest in unmet desire, finding greater ecstasy in the wait than in the act. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 4, 2024
Though Guadagnino is a gifted director, his style is sometimes showily baroque to a fault. (Exhibit A: Suspiria.) But Queer, stylish as it is, may be his most heartfelt movie, at least since Call Me By Your Name. Read full review
80
NMEMatthew TurnerSep 4, 2024
Craig delivers one of his best performances to date as Lee, investing him with a palpable world-weariness and making you feel every moment of hope, desire, ecstasy and crushing disappointment. Starkey is excellent too, generating strong chemistry with Craig. Read full review
80
VarietyOwen GleibermanSep 3, 2024
The last third of “Queer” may prove to be a challenge for audiences — much more so than the film’s explicit eroticism. Yet Luca Guadagino is telling a version of the same compelling story that he told in “Call Me by Your Name”: that of a queer love that, instead of delivering the salvation it promises, withers under the gaze of the real world. Read full review
80
IGNSiddhant AdlakhaSep 3, 2024
It doesn't always work; it loses its way midway through, as though in desperate search of purpose. But when it finds that purpose, it makes a powerful emotional impression: Visually splendid, emotionally arresting, and features some of the finest filmmaking of Guadagnino's already-accomplished career. Read full review
80
Screen RantAlex HarrisonSep 3, 2024
It's as rewarding as it is challenging. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 3, 2024
Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent. Read full review
75
ABC NewsPeter TraversDec 13, 2024
This flawed but fascinating gay love story from director Luca Guadagnino is lifted to the heights by Daniel Craig who captures his character’s sexual heat and yearning heart in a performance he seems to tear from his insides. Is an Oscar nomination next? That’s the idea. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreDec 10, 2024
The narrative may dawdle, the anachronistic music contributes to a disorienting disconnect and there may be too much of a suggestion that “love” is one-sided thing, first to last. Guadagnino’s ” romances”seem to lean that way. But Craig’s performance more than compensates for those shortcomings. Read full review
75
The Seattle TimesChase HutchinsonDec 4, 2024
When Queer wanders in its own direction in the shaky latter half and captivating conclusion, it may lose some watchers in this descent into dreamlike despair. Still, it crafts a critical last paint stroke in its delicate portrait of desire. Read full review
75
The Associated PressMark KennedyNov 26, 2024
Queer is best when it’s a character study of Lee, who in Craig’s hands is charming, selfish, arrogant, abrasive, foppish and sometimes unable to read a room. It’s a million miles from 007, even if Lee carries a pistol. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMichael OrdoñaNov 25, 2024
Guadagnino’s filmmaking has never been more vivid. Read full review
75
The Daily BeastNick SchagerSep 10, 2024
The film may be as fragmented as its protagonist and, ultimately, unable to reconcile its disparate facets, but its headliner’s portrait of desire, degradation, and delirium is a sight to behold—and the performance of his career. Read full review
75
The PlaylistMarshall ShafferSep 3, 2024
Queer feels unsettled and inconsistent—but never anything less than fascinating to watch unfold. Read full review
70
ColliderRoss BonaimeSep 17, 2024
Queer might not be everyone's vibe, especially when it gets wild in the final third, but there's something in the way that Guadagnino brings all these elements together and crafts his own story out of Burroughs' novel that continues his growth as an essential filmmaker of today. Read full review
65
The Film VerdictStephen DaltonSep 3, 2024
Guadagnino has remixed an imperfect, incomplete book into an imperfect, incomplete film. Read full review
63
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperDec 4, 2024
Queer is a good-looking film with moments of great promise that is much like Lee in that it wears out its welcome and tries your patience far too often. Read full review
60
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rebecca TuckerDec 13, 2024
It is a remarkably beautiful portrait of agony, anchored by Craig’s remarkably understated performance. But it’s also a film at odds with itself. Read full review
60
EmpireJohn NugentNov 25, 2024
A feverish, quietly sad exploration of longing and infatuation. Its lack of focus stifles the experience, but Daniel Craig has rarely been as compelling a watch. Read full review
60
LooperAudrey FoxSep 6, 2024
Although the relationship between Craig and Drew Starkey, who plays his reluctant lover, is endlessly fascinating, the film doesn't do enough to explore it, instead taking an odd third act turn into an entirely different plot and dragging out every minute of its runtime with trippy, pseudo-intellectual visuals. Read full review
60
Time OutSophie Monks KaufmanSep 3, 2024
Queer may be flawed, but its naked approach to such a raw subject, coupled with a remarkable lead performance, makes it a trip worth taking. Read full review
60
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganSep 3, 2024
For a Burroughs adaptation, it has all the provocation but none of the haunting power that Naked Lunch still holds, almost 35 years later. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreSep 3, 2024
The stylistic choices Guadagnino makes throughout Queer are invariably more engaging than the central story itself, no matter what the filmmaker tries unsuccessfully to will it into. Read full review
60
BBCNicholas BarberSep 3, 2024
Craig's soul-baring, skin-baring turn aside, Queer is a proudly artificial curio. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerDec 5, 2024
In his three-acts-and-an-epilogue structure, Guadagnino inserts more story than Burroughs intended, and Queer becomes aimless. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesDec 5, 2024
The resulting film is curiously anachronistic and unconvincing, less a journey to a distant time and place than an Instagram post of one—pretty, posed and denuded of deeper feelings. Read full review
50
Paste MagazineLuke HicksOct 11, 2024
Where Burroughs achieved the profound in the brevity of the novella, Guadagnino punishes you with longwindedness, ending after (non-final) ending souring the film into a clock-watching endurance test. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineKeith UhlichOct 8, 2024
In the end, Luca Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner. Read full review
50
Entertainment WeeklyMaureen Lee LenkerSep 12, 2024
Queer is an exercise in cinematic smugness. It’s a shame because it does contain some truly fine performances and compelling imagery. But much like its central character, it can’t get over itself. Read full review
42
The Film StageLeonardo GoiSep 3, 2024
Queer’s hollowness––its inability to fully flesh out its hero’s psyche––feels all the more conspicuous: a failure of the imagination. Read full review
40
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeDec 16, 2024
The yagé trip sequence is overlong, baggy and indulgent. The characters lose all sense of their bodies; the film simply loses its point. Read full review
40
The Irish TimesTara BradyDec 11, 2024
The misused music and hollow visuals set the tone for a vacuous film that frequently feels like an overstyled catalogue shoot. Read full review
40
The TimesKevin MaherSep 3, 2024
It’s visually appealing, obviously, because Guadagnino does not make ugly films. But it’s difficult to convey how little, dramatically speaking, is happening here. Read full review
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