Queer (Luca Guadagnino, 2024). Adapting the work of William S. Burroughs to the screen is a losing battle, and Luca Guadagnino goes down in fiery defeat. With a script by Justin Kuritzkes, who also penned Guadagnino’s Challengers, the film adapts Queer, a novella Burroughs wrote in the nineteen-fifties and didn’t publish until the nineteen-eighties. William Lee (Daniel Craig) is a boozy, American writer living in Mexico City in the early fifties. He spends most of his time patrolling his favorite seedy spaces for a handsome fella to hook up with. The most intriguing potential paramour is Eugene (Drew Starkey), a young military man who runs hot and cold as William courts him. Craig has his moments in the role, but the performance is all over the place: sometimes internalized and subtle, sometimes so broad it plays footsie with cartoonish parody, and sometimes confused and at direct odds with the tone and tenor of everyone else in the scene. That discordance could be deliberate, a cinematic method for mirroring the fragmentary language of Burroughs. Instead, Queer comes across as messy, unfocused, and unconvincing, especially in the later passages that involve a quest through the jungle to retrieve some storied natural psychoactive drugs. Guadagnino keeps upping the trippy visual trickery until the closing scenes indulge in JV David Lynch posturing.

Lee (Ellen Kuras, 2024). Kate Winslet is very strong as revered World War II photographer and correspondent Lee Miller in this biopic that concentrates on her years edging ever closer to the front lines of the global conflict. Ellen Kuras’s direction is solid and clear, which sometimes has the unfortunate effect of emphasizing all the ways that Lee is stiff and standard in so much of its conception and staging. There’s a framing device that is less clever than the filmmakers seem to think it is, and the script is hampered by miserably stilted dialogue. Aside from Winslet, the other actors range from shaky (Alexander Skarsgård) to passable (Andy Samberg) to strangely underused (Marion Cotillard, Josh O’Connor). Still, Miller’s career is worthy of the attention that the film puts on it, and it provides Winslet with the best bigscreen role she’s had in years. Those attributes are worth celebrating.

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2024). Writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to the stellar Drive My Car is comparatively modest in scale while still proving to be equally impressive in its inventive storytelling and empathetic humanity. In the film, a humble mountain community is fretting over the incursion of a business venture meant to offer glamping experiences to well-heeled tourists. Hamaguchi is steadfastly patient in his storytelling, allowing scenes to play out slowly so that telling details accumulate. In particular, the centerpiece scene at a municipal meeting is a quiet, understated marvel, absolutely gripping in its mundanity. There’s still a certain amount of opaqueness to the work. After so much that’s so plain, the ending of Evil Does Not Exist is potentially distancing in its cryptic qualities. I liked its mildly challenging nature. It comes across as Hamaguchi seeking dialogue with the viewer as he makes his arguments about capitalism eroding both community and nature. Hitoshi Omika gives a nice performance in the film’s lead role, a local handyman who his fellow residents look to for guidance.