From A Little Peach To A Big Splash — This is Every Luca Guadagnino Movie, In Order
If you don’t know what kind of filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is, consider this tasty morsel: in the years since Quentin Tarantino released Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, the Italian has made a remake of a classic horror (Suspiria), a cannibal romance starring Timothee Chalamet (Bones and All); a sweaty, sexy, sports movie (Challengers); an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel starring James Bond (Queer); and a campus-set film that dives into some of the most hot-buttoned topics of the day (After the Hunt). Say what you want about any of them, the man has considerable range, is nothing if not prolific, and he knows, ahem, how to make a splash.
Another thing worth knowing about Guadagnino is that he tends to announce all kinds of projects (most recently an AI drama starring Mark Rylance and a new adaptation of American Psycho) that never get made. As we wait to hear what the next one might be, here’s a list of every film the director has made since his 1999 debut. Read on to discover more, and use the guide below to find them on services like Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Given the main things we now associate with the director—his film knowledge, evocative style and taste for genre—it’s probably no surprise that his earliest work demonstrated all three. The film is called The Protagonists and stars Tilda Swinton as an actress working in an Italian film crew who have come to London to restage a real murder that happened a few years earlier.
Tilda Swinton has gone on to be his most enduring collaborator, so if you appreciate what they went on to achieve together in I am Love and A Bigger Splash, you’ll probably enjoy this one.
If protagonists leaned into Guadagnino’s taste for genre filmmaking, his follow-up, Melissa P., showcased his fascination with provocative eroticism. The film is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Melissa Panarello titled 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, which detailed the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old girl.
This is one you might appreciate if you liked Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name or Catherine Breillat’s recent film Last Summer — just be warned, it’s a rather daring piece of work.
Guadagnino’s first two films had announced him as a director to watch, but he reached a whole other level of arthouse fame after the release of I am Love in 2009. The Milan-set movie, his second collaboration with Swinton, is a stunning production — enough, at least, for it to be nominated for Best Costume at the Oscars.
The film centres on an illustrious affair between a wealthy textile merchant’s wife (Swinton) and a younger man (Edoardo Gabbriellini). If you enjoy stories about promiscuous rich people—think Dark Waters, Match Point—you might just appreciate this one, too.
After I am Love, Guadagnino followed it up with the wonderful A Bigger Splash, the second part of what he would later call his Desire trilogy. The movie takes place on a hot and sweaty Italian island (for a good comp, think White Lotus, or movies like Le Piscine and Swimming Pool), where a foursome of beautiful people (Swinton again, alongside Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson, and Matthias Schoenaert) trade jokes, jabs, and flirtatious glances—at least until something goes horribly wrong.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival but surprisingly went home empty-handed, as did Fiennes for what has to be one of his most joyful roles — so if you’re a fan of his work, you need to check it out!
At the time of writing, I think most appreciators of Guadagnino’s work, even the most diehard fans of Challengers, will likely agree that Call Me by Your Name still looks like the director’s masterpiece. Like Melissa P., the story follows a teenager’s sexual awakening, but it’s a far more sensitive story, even accounting for the iconic peach scene.
It maybe helped that the director managed to convince the legendary screenwriter James Ivory (think Remains of the Day and Howards End) to help him adapt André Aciman’s novel, or that he managed to get the first great performance out of Timothée Chalamet (for which the actor was nominated for his first Oscar), but whatever the case, the film remains a wonderfully sensuous, tender and heartbreaking watch.
Guadagnino originally acquired the rights to Dario Argento’s Giallo horror Suspiria in 2008 but put it on the back burner for a decade before finally getting his version out in 2018. For the script, the Italian relocated his fellow countryman’s story from Freiburg to Cold War era Berlin, giving the story a new and interesting flavour — one that fans of movies like Possession and The Hunger will be familiar with.
The film saw the director reteam with Dakota Johnson, who played the role of the ingénue who ends up in a ballet school that seems to be run by a coven of witches.
After the financial disappointment of Suspiria, the director took a short break from feature filmmaking to focus on other projects—notably making the coming-of-age miniseries We Are Who We Are for HBO. He returned with another horror film, Bones and All, in 2022, this one a cannibal love story that reunited the director with Chalamet and also saw him work with Mark Rylance for the first time—and if you liked the actor’s performances in Bridge of Spies and Wolf Hall, you want to see the brilliantly unsettling work he contributes here.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Guadagnino was finally awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director.
In 2023, Guadagnino was given the honour of opening the Venice Festival with his new film, Challengers. Sadly for the festival, the SAG-AFRA strike meant that none of the stars could attend, so the film was withdrawn and opened the following March—which, if its box office success (and he kinda needed one) was anything to go by, turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
This is probably the most fun and straight-up mainstream entertainment film that the director has made: a slick, stylish and sweaty sports movie that features a tennis based love triangle between three players. They are played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist—and if you like those actors in movies like Dune, La Chimera and West Side Story, something tells me you’ll appreciate this one.
Thanks, in part, to the delay of Challengers’ release, Guadagnino fans only had to wait a few months before his next film premiered (you guessed it) at the Venice Film Festival. Starring Daniel Craig, Queer is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical story of the same name, which details the writer’s time as a boozy, recreationally drug-addled horndog in Mexico City — imagine Naked Lunch meets A Single Man and you’ll be somewhere in the region of this film’s sultry mood.
Like Guadagnino’s best, it’s a sexy and sweaty piece with wonderful costumes (from J.W. Anderson) and an excellent score by returning Challengers composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Exactly one year later, Guadagnino was invited to open the Italian festival again, this time with the hotly anticipated After the Hunt—a film starring Julia Roberts as an acclaimed professor at a prestigious university who dragged into the middle of an accusation of misconduct levelled by her closest student (played by Ayo Edebiri) against one of her closest colleagues (Andrew Garfield).
The movie is an outright provocation, and even though it’s not entirely satisfying in what it’s trying to do, it’s interesting to see Guadagnino attempt to grapple with such spicy topics. If you are a fan of films like Tár and Dream Scenario, you might find this one frustrating but you’ll likely find it interesting, too.
