Luca Guadagnino's adulated new dart within male sexuality quandaries features a bourgeois fellow who appears to reside in the middle-ground of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Where do I add that he's also underage and falls in love with a man visibly older than him? Those are inordinately trifling matters that didn't grate me as they seemed to have others. Please. If there's one thing where Guadagnino's vision excels, it's in that broiling Mediterranean summer atmosphere that so feels like a breeze within those pastel-tinged frames that fill up the screen like the beaming rays of sunshine in the hot season. It's such a clanger that, in a bevy that is this ripe, so much is wasted with Guadagnino's proclivity of mimicking the allure of Todd Haynes' Carol. There's a shortage of emotional bouts, and Guadagnino greedily has a go multiple times at the seemingly canonic show, not tell cinema shtick that, more often than not, fails to connect efficiently because of how much resources are wasted thereupon. Call Me by Your Name is a shell of a film, a semblance of a warm and cordial affair, a chance badly wasted in the circumstances Guadagnino's other pieces in the puzzle provide. The main characters barely feel fleshed out. There's a clear non-parallelism between what this movie wants and pretends it is, and what it actually manages to obtain. I couldn't find anything to cling onto, and I'm more than sure it's not my sexuality playing head games. The film outright doesn't know how to transmit its message fully -- fervent love is shown on screen, but real, palatable emotion is nowhere to be found. It's as if the film knows the basics of its language, but springs for complex structures.

Call Me by Your Name is also a feature of my best shots from films list.