From Owen Gleiberman‘s Venice Film Festival review of Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer:

“Daniel Craig, shifting about a dozen gears from James Bond, doesn’t make the mistake of impersonating the older William Burroughs who became a punk icon in the ’80s: the dry voice, the beady-eyed stare of hostility. Craig gives us a pinch of that glowering Burroughs DNA, but the trick of his performance, which is bold and funny and alive, is that he’s playing the younger Burroughs (at the time, the author was around 40), before he’d passed through the looking glass of cultivated insanity to write his visionary novel of American chaos, ‘Naked Lunch.’

“This is Burroughs before he got famous, when he was just…a man, pursuing what his instincts told him to. Craig makes him a nasty, witty literary dog laced with vulnerability. Pounding back shots of tequila, spitting out winding assertions like ‘Your generation has never learned the pleasures that a tutored palate confers on a magnificent few,’ he’s a troublemaker, an abrasive soul. But he is also, deep in that bitter heart of his, a romantic. He tries to maintain power in every situation, but as soon as he meets Eugene, we see that the desire for love has supreme power over him.”