Drunken Noodles

🙂 Drunken Noodles, dir. Lucio Castro, 2025, Argentina/USA, 82 min., mostly in English without subtitles with significant parts in Spanish with English subtitles
Sunday, June 21, 2026, 6:30 PM, Castro Theatre

Drunken Noodles

Frameline blurb: Argentine auteur Lucio Castro explores four chapters in the life of handsome art student Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), each depicting his intimate encounters at the height of summer with a stunning dose of magical realism. Cat-sitting for his vacationing uncle and interning at a gallery, Adnan finds New York City to be a world of endless possibility and erotic intrigue. Trysts with delivery boys, moonlit cruising, and the awakening of new sexual desires shape an evocative and fresh portrait of the city. Through each of the nonlinear chapters, Drunken Noodles showcases summertime at its sultriest and stickiest and the exterior world at its most majestic.

Following his outstanding feature debut 👌  End of the Century (winner of the Outstanding First Feature at Frameline43), Castro establishes himself as a unique and exciting voice in contemporary queer cinema — an artist unafraid of subverting time and space to discover romantic and mystical realms beyond our perceived reality.

My take: The key word here is nonlinear. Drunken Noodles feels more like four short films concatenated together than like a feature film. There were some interesting, fun, and sometimes sexy bits, particularly when it dips into that “magical realism,” but it didn’t come together as a satisfying whole. Watchable, but unsatisfying. I thought End of the Century (Fin de siglo) was okay, but just okay, and Drunken Noodles is about the same. Recommended.

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