Just Catching Up

Hey, everybody! Apologies for taking last week off, but I was finishing up a contract thing and it required a lot more of my time than I’d expected. (Subscribers to the paid tier got my review of The Life of Chuck in the Friday What’s Worth Watching newsletter, so if that sounds like something you’d enjoy reading, you can always upgrade and catch up on months of archived advisories!)

Between that last-minute push and the slow pace of US fulfillment – we can blame Trump for that, right? – I’ve had to juggle some coverage, and I’ll be catching up to all of in over the next week and a half. Today I’m doing the decent thing and looking at three Blu-rays that hit the shelves at the end of May.

Let’s start with A24’s Queer, since it played the festival circuit last fall, including a stop at TIFF. Luca Guadagnino’s second 2024 feature after Challengers, it’s an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semiautobiographical novella about the author’s life-changing stay in Mexico City circa 1950. It’s also, inevitably, a riff of David Cronenberg’s earlier Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch, which referenced elements of Queer along with several of Burroughs’ other texts.

Daniel Craig plays Burroughs’ surrogate Bill Lee, and his interpretation of the role is very different from what Peter Weller gave Cronenberg; where the earlier Bill existed in a state of absurdist deadpan, walking bemused through a gallery of his own hallucinations, Craig’s Bill is a truly lost soul, adrift in a world of cheap pleasure and unable to enjoy any of it.

Craig and Weller both understand that Bill is a spectator – in Naked Lunch, he identifies himself over and over again as a writer of reports – but Queer’s Bill doesn’t even have that to cling to. He’s just quietly despairing, filling his time with drinking and anonymous hookups … until he meets Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), another American wandering around Mexico City, and wakes up.

Allerton seems to appreciate Bill’s attention, but keeps the older man at arm’s length, and those of us who saw Craig in Roger Michell’s Enduring Love two decades ago will be quietly impressed that he’s found a way to play the other side of that film’s crucial relationship: Now, he’s the one playing a man in desperate need of connection, and we understand exactly where he’s coming from.

In story terms, that’s pretty much all there is to it; much like Call Me by Your Name, Queer is an intimate character study following two characters as they slowly draw closer together, given depth and gravity through the performance of its leading man. The Burroughs of it all gives Guadagnino a chance to get a little trippy when Lee and Allerton journey to Ecuador to experience the hallucinogenic properties of the exotic plant yagé, but even after Challengers I’m still unconvinced that Guadagnino fully understands how to deploy stylistic devices. Again, comparisons to Naked Lunch are inescapable – and Cronenberg’s film comes out on top.

And as we recently saw in Suspiria and Bones and All, a Guadagnino joint is an excuse for actors to try the stuff no one else will let them do. Lesley Manville gets slathered in earth-mother grime as the ayahuasca enthusiast Dr. Cotter, while Jason Schwartzman literally submerges himself in the role of Bill’s steadfast buddy Joe Guidry; it’s a genuine shock to recognize his eyes peering out from inside the Guidry suit. But does it add anything to the movie, or our understanding of the character? I’m still not sure.

What I do know is that Daniel Craig is a magnetic and compelling actor, and after a decade and a half tied up by the demands of the Bond franchise it’s clear he’s relishing his freedom – taking roles that interest him, working with people he wants to work with, pushing against the audience’s expectations just because he can. Queer may have its weaknesses, but his performance isn’t one of them.

A24’s Blu-ray of Queer is another of the studio’s carefully curated packages, with a convivial audio commentary from Guadagnino, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, costume designer Jonathan W. Anderson, production designer Stefano Baisi and editor Marco Costa; a half-hour production documentary, “Diverso: The Making of Queer;” brief looks at staging, visual effects and miniatures and a music video for Omar Apollo’s “Te Maldigo.”

It’s all interesting, though it does rather support my contention that Guadagnino was more interested in exteriors than interiors on this project. As is standard with A24’s physical releases, the packaging includes half a dozen collectible art cards, here representing a collection of Bill’s stuff scattered across his bedsheets. I wonder what they’ll do for Warfare.

I suppose I have less to say about The Woman in the Yard and The Alto Knights, two spring releases that came to disc a lot faster than Queer. They’re both made by proficient filmmakers (Jaume Collett-Serra and Barry Levinson, respectively), and they’re both kinda-sorta about doppelgangers, but … well, there’s just not that much going on in either picture.

I’ll say this for The Woman in the Yard: It starts off brilliantly. Sam Stefanak’s script has a genuinely gripping first act, quickly establishing the characters, the setting and the stakes. At an isolated farmhouse, a deeply depressed woman named Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) is roused out of bed by her teenage son Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and younger daughter Annie (Estella Kahiha) because the power’s gone out.

We quickly learn that Ramona is recuperating from injuries sustained in a car wreck that claimed the life of her husband (Russell Hornsby) and very nearly killed her, too … so the last thing she needs is a mysterious veiled woman to appear outside, sitting calmly in a chair and saying weird stuff like “Today’s the day.”

Ramona asks The Woman to identify herself, and then to leave, but strange things keep happening to distract her – and every time Ramona looks back, The Woman gets a little closer, like one of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. The second act is all about determining who The Woman is and what she wants, with Ramona growing increasingly frightened and angry and trying to keep her kids from seeing her panic.

It’s a different role for Deadwyler, who’s usually the most imposing presence in whatever movie she’s in – you’ll love what RT Thorne lets her do in 40 Acres, opening next month – and she and Collet-Serra get a great deal of mileage from Ramona trying and failing to modulate her fraying mental state, especially when they can contrast it to the happier, healthier woman we see in flashbacks.

But when the time comes for Stefanak to tell us what’s going on, The Woman in the Yard just crumples where it stands, throwing out clumsy platitudes about grief and trauma that neither the actors nor a filmmaker as genre-savvy as Collet-Serra can deliver with any conviction. It looks great, though.

Universal’s BD of The Woman in the Yard comes offers two brief featurettes: “Making The Woman in the Yard” is your basic cast-and-crew EPK, while “Beneath the Veil” gives Okwui Okpokwasili a little more space to talk about her performance and what the character of The Woman represents in the film. It’s not exactly revelatory – like I said, the movie ensures we understand everything that’s going on very clearly by the third act – but it’s nice to see Okpokwasili get her moment in the spotlight.

The Alto Knights doesn’t even have stylish cinematography on its side, I’m afraid. It’s a conventional, deeply ordinary crime drama about the war between Luciano crime family capo Frank Costello and his paranoid underboss Vito Genovese, which led to the establishment of the Genovese crime family and a whole lot of bloodshed. The twist is that both Costello and Genovese are played by Robert De Niro under various levels of latex.

Nicholas Pileggi’s script is a proficient chronology of various setups, betrayals and double-crosses, opening with Frank escaping a hit ordered by Vito and going back and forth between scenes of Frank reassuring his wife Bobbie (Debra Messing) that he just wants out, and Vito raging at his underlings to whack the guy already. The two capos meet for a couple of tense conversations, but for the most part the narrative isolates them within their own worlds, not unlike Michael Mann’s Heat.

And given that this project has been in development for decades, maybe Heat was what producer Irwin Winkler had in mind at one point, an epic clash of titans playing out on an expansive canvas. (I could totally see Al Pacino as Vito, come to think of it.) Winkler might even have wanted to direct it himself around that time, having just made Guilty by Suspicion and Night and the City with De Niro after producing GoodFellas – which, just like The Alto Knights, was scripted by Nicholas Pileggi.

The name that’s conspicuously absent here, of course, is Martin Scorsese, whose working relationship with Winkler goes back to New York, New York. Certainly The Alto Knights feels like a pitch Scorsese might have had on the back burner for a while before realizing it wouldn’t let him break any new ground; it’s possible that familiar quality was exactly what appealed to Levinson, who’s been working almost exclusively in television since 2015’s Bill Murray comedy Rock the Kasbah, a film that you almost certainly don’t remember. (Hell, I reviewed that one and I don’t remember it.)

The other weird thing about having De Niro play both Frank and Vito is that it calls attention to the film’s flaws in really unnecessary ways: The Alto Knights is not Heat, which was a cat-and-mouse thriller with Neil McCauley setting up his next job with his crew while Vincent Hanna worked to figure out who they were and where they’d strike next. The Alto Knights is a movie where two old mobsters do old-mobster stuff, and both of them are Robert De Niro. That ought to be a lot more fun than it is.

There are no special features on Warner’s Blu-ray of The Alto Knights whatsoever, which surprised me; surely there’d be plenty of B-roll of De Niro and his acting double negotiating the elaborate motion-control shoots. But no, Warner’s disc offers nothing beyond the feature, not even a trailer. We are left alone with our thoughts.

Queer, The Woman in the Yard and The Alto Knights are now available on Blu-ray from A24 Studios, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Discovery Home Entertainment, respectively.

Up next: Bond. James Bond. And also Hugh Jackman.