Monday new releases: 7 April 2025

Queer, Grand Tour, A Minecraft Movie and Project Fiftyone are in cinemas and Broken Rage is streaming on Prime Video.

The nice thing about the first three movies in the newsletter today is that you can’t really describe them by comparing them to other films. They are that rare thing these days, novel.

The first actually comes from a novel – or at least a novella. Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is based on William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical book from 1985 and I was surprised at how weird it got. The transgressions that it is most interested in are more the chemical rather than the sexual ones. It’s also more romantic than I was expecting it to be.

Daniel Craig, well and truly throwing off the shackles of Bond, plays Burroughs stand-in William Lee, a dissolute American writer in exile in Mexico where his “proclivities” are more acceptable. There, he drinks a great deal, picks up men in bars and maintains a modest heroin habit.

He becomes besotted with a handsome young American, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a serviceman on shore leave and a man whose own proclivities are flexible. Lee is electrified by the thrill of the chase but the consummation, disappointingly, comes as a result of over-indulgence rather cupid’s arrow.

Knowing that he is unlikely to persuade Allerton to stay by his side for love alone – or perhaps not having the self-confidence to try – Lee cuts a deal. Take a trip with me to South America, where there may be more drug-fuelled adventures to have, and you’ll only have to have sex with me twice a week.

One of Lee’s problems, as he himself owns up to, is that he is independently wealthy which means he has no discipline and little grasp of reality. In Ecuador, with supplies of junk much harder to obtain, he hatches a plan to explore the jungle looking for a psychotropic experience that will open up a world of telepathy – a way, I think, for Lee to connect intimately with people that he finds so difficult in the real world.

Shot entirely in the Italian studio wonderland of Cinecittà, Queer is beautiful to look at, and often terrifically weird. Craig is brilliant as the forlorn writer, desperately lonely and destined to remain so.

I tried to review Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour on RNZ last Friday night and, as I suspected, got into a tangle trying to describe it. It’s a story of colonial escape in which British bureaucrat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) runs away from his job in Rangoon (Burma in 1918) so that he doesn’t have to marry his fiancée who is just about to arrive from London. He then makes his way across Asia – from Singapore, through Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and China – pursued by the indomitable Molly (Crista Alfaiate).

The neat trick here is that the scenes featuring actors are all shot in European studios, and these very English characters all speak Portuguese making for some cognitive dissonance on my part, and the Asian exterior sequences are all shot as contemporary documentary, meaning that the travelogue component is much more a European perspective on today’s Asia but from a no-less mystified cultural perspective as Edward and Molly’s.