Luca Guadagnino’s films are all about the transformative power of nature—the way it allows our true selves to shine through and inspires us to pursue our hidden passions. From the wild, windswept hills of “I Am Love” to the chic swimming pool of “A Bigger Splash,” Guadagnino vividly portrays the outside world as almost a character in itself—driving the storyline, urging the other characters to be bold, inviting us to feel as if we, too, are a part of this intoxicating atmosphere. 
 
 Never has this been more true than in “Call Me By Your Name,” a lush and vibrant masterpiece about first love set amid the warm, sunny skies, gentle breezes and charming, tree-lined roads of northern Italy. Guadagnino takes his time establishing this place and the players within it. He’s patient in his pacing, and you must be, as well. But really, what’s the rush? It’s the summer of 1983, and there’s nothing to do but read, play piano, ponder classic art and pluck peaches and apricots from the abundant fruit trees. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 Within this garden of sensual delights, an unexpected yet life-changing romance blossoms between two young men who initially seem completely different on the surface. 
 
 17-year-old Elio (Timothee Chalamet) is once again visiting his family’s summer home with his parents: his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an esteemed professor of Greco-Roman culture, and his mother (Amira Casar), a translator and gracious hostess. Elio has the gangly body of a boy but with an intellect and a quick wit beyond his years, and the worldliness his parents have fostered within him at least allows him to affect the façade of sophistication. But beneath the bravado, a gawky and self-conscious kid sometimes still emerges. By the end of the summer, that kid will be vanquished forever. 
 
 An American doctoral student named Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives for the annual internship Elio’s father offers. Oliver is everything Elio isn’t—or at least, that’s our primary perception of him. Tall, gorgeous and supremely confident, he is the archetypal all-American hunk. But as polite as he often can be, Oliver can also breeze out of a room with a glib, “Later,” making him even more of a tantalizing mystery. 
 
 Chalamet and Hammer have just ridiculous chemistry from the get-go, even though (or perhaps because) their characters are initially prickly toward each other: testing, pushing, feeling each other out, yet constantly worrying about what the other person thinks. They flirt by trying to one-up each other with knowledge of literature or classical music, but long before they ever have any physical contact, their electric connection is unmistakable. Lazy poolside chats are fraught with tension; spontaneous bike rides into town to run errands feel like nervous first dates. 
 
 Writer James Ivory’s generous, sensitive adaptation of Andre Aciman’s novel reveals these characters and their ever-evolving dynamic in beautifully steady yet detailed fashion. And so when Elio and Oliver finally dare to reveal their true feelings for each other—a full hour into the film—the moment makes you hold your breath with its intimate power, and the emotions feel completely authentic and earned. 
 
 The way Elio and Oliver peel away each other’s layers has both a sweetness and a giddy thrill to it, even though they feel they must keep their romance a secret from Elio’s parents. (Elio also has a kinda-sorta girlfriend in Marzia [Esther Garrel], a thoughtful, playful French teen who’s also in town for the summer.) One of the many impressive elements of Chalamet’s beautiful, complex performance is the effortless way he transitions between speaking in English, Italian and French, depending on whom Elio is with at the time. It gives him an air of maturity that’s otherwise still in development; eventually his massive character arc feels satisfying and true. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 But Oliver’s evolution is just as crucial, and Hammer finds the tricky balance between the character’s swagger and his vulnerability as he gives himself over to this exciting affair. He’s flirty but tender—the couple’s love scenes are heartbreaking and intensely erotic all at once—and even though he’s the more experienced of the two, he can’t help but diving in headlong. 
 
 And yet, the most resonant part of “Call Me By Your Name” may not even be the romance itself, but rather the lingering sensation that it can’t last, which Guadagnino evokes through long takes and expert use of silence. A feeling of melancholy tinges everything, from the choice of a particular shirt to the taste of a perfectly ripe peach. And oh my, that peach scene—Guadagnino was wise when he took a chance and left it in from the novel. It really works, and it’s perhaps the ultimate example of how masterfully the director manipulates and enlivens all of our senses. 
 
 There’s a lushness to the visual beauty of this place, but it’s not so perfect as to be off-putting. Quite the opposite. Despite the director’s infamous eye for meticulous detail, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s 35mm images provide a tactile quality that heightens the sensations, makes them feel almost primal. We see the wind gently rustling through the trees, or streaks of sunlight hitting Elio’s dark curls through an open bedroom window, and while it’s all subtly sensual, an inescapable tension is building underneath. 
 
 Guadagnino establishes that raw, immediate energy from the very beginning through his use of music. The piano of contemporary classical composer John Adams’ intricate, insistent “Hallelujah Junction – 1st Movement” engages us during the elegant title sequence, while Sufjan Stevens’ plaintive, synthy “Visions of Gideon” during the film’s devastating final shot ends the film on an agonizingly sad note. (You’ll want to stay all the way through the closing credits—that long, last image is so transfixing. I seriously don’t know how Chalamet pulled it off, but there is serious craft on display here.) 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 In between is Guadagnino’s inspired use of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” an iconic ’80s New Wave tune you’ve probably heard a million times before but will never hear the same way again. The first time he plays it, it’s at an outdoor disco where Oliver feels so moved by the bouncy, percussive beat that he can’t help but jump around to it and get lost in the music, lacking all sense of self-consciousness. Watching this towering figure just go for it on the dance floor in his Converse high-tops is a moment of pure joy, but it’s also as if a dam has broken within Elio, being so close to someone who’s feeling so free. The second time he plays it, toward the end of Oliver and Elio’s journey, it feels like the soundtrack to a time capsule as it recaptures a moment of seemingly endless emotional possibility. 
 
 They know what they’ve found has to end—we know it has to end. But a beautiful monologue from the always excellent Stuhlbarg as Elio’s warmhearted and open-minded father softens the blow somewhat. It’s a perfectly calibrated scene in a film full of them, and it’s one of a million reasons why “Call Me By Your Name” is far and away the best movie of the year. ||||| CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, the new film by Luca Guadagnino, is a sensual and transcendent tale of first love, based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman. It's the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, and Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a precocious 17-year-old young man, spends his days in his family's 17th century villa transcribing and playing classical music, reading, and flirting with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Elio enjoys a close relationship with his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture, and his mother Annella (Amira Casar), a translator, who favor him with the fruits of high culture in a setting that overflows with natural delights. While Elio's sophistication and intellectual gifts suggest he is already a fully-fledged adult, there is much that yet remains innocent and unformed about him, particularly about matters of the heart. One day, Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American college graduate student working on his... Written by Sony Pictures Classics ||||| In sensitive family drama ‘Beautiful Boy,’ man’s addiction tests his dad’s love 
 
 David Sheff is one of those “involved” fathers who rarely existed, at least not in the movies, until the last generation or so. The kind of dad who vowed to be different from his own father, to avoid leaving the nuts-and-bolts (and the blood and the sweat and the tears) of child-rearing to mom, while he was out earning a living, or sitting in his favorite chair, reading the newspaper and nursing his after-dinner drink and saying, “Ask your mother,” to just about any question. 
 
 In the flashback sequences of Felix van Groeningen’s sensitive and lushly photographed and sometimes quite heartbreaking addiction tale “Beautiful Boy,” Steve Carell’s David is the primary parental figure in his son Nic’s life. Hugging him and holding him and nurturing him and encouraging him and eventually becoming his best friend. 
 
 Why, David even shares a joint and engages in big-time bonding with the teenage Nic (played at that point by Timothee Chalamet). 
 
 Cut to a few years later, when the college-age Nic has become a shadow of himself — an alarmingly thin, corpse-pale, jittery, angry, resentful, self-destructive, bitter young man prone to lashing out at anyone, including his father, who tries to help him. 
 
 Nic is an addict. He has tried anything and everything, but he’s hooked the hardest on crystal meth, perhaps the most lethal and most unshakable drug of all. 
 
 How did Nic get here? He grew up in a comfortable, upper-middle-class home in sun-dappled Marin County, where his journalist father and his painter mother (Maura Tierney) showered him with love and attention and encouraged him to pursue his love of writing. He’s smart and kind and handsome and charming, and would seem to have the world waiting at his doorstep. 
 
 So what happened? What was the event(s) that started Nic on this pitch-black path of addiction? “I don’t know, I don’t know,” says Nic — and while that’s no doubt true, it leads to a somewhat frustrating circle of events from a dramatic standpoint, as “Beautiful Boy” takes us through the seemingly endless and hellish cycle of addiction that threatens to end Nic’s young life and take down his family in the process. 
 
 We share David’s pain over Nic’s addiction and we empathize with his frustration and despair when it feels as if all hope is lost — but the sad thing is, we’ve seen this story many times before. It’s the fine writing and the heartfelt performances that elevate “Beautiful Boy” to something more than just another well-made cautionary tale. 
 
 Based on the best-selling twin memoirs from David Sheff and Nic Sheff and set mostly in the early 2000s, “Beautiful Boy” tells the story through David’s prism. The walls of David’s home office are filled with framed covers of his interviews for Playboy and Esquire and the New York Times with the likes of John Lennon and Steve Jobs. We occasionally see snippets of David in the conference room at Rolling Stone, discussing his next project. 
 
 As David’s oldest boy Nic falls deeper into addiction and often disappears from home for months at a time, David takes a journalist’s approach to investigating the drug epidemic as he tries to understand the dark allure of hardcore usage. (He even takes out a powder of some kind at one point and snorts it, resulting in an unfortunate scene that looks like it’s from a 1970s film, with David acting the fool while jamming to his record collection.) 
 
 MORE FROM RICHARD ROEPER 
 
 Urgent but emotional, ‘The Hate U Give’ reflects the realities of right now 
 
 ‘First Man’ brilliantly depicts rise of Neil Armstrong, step by giant step 
 
 Carell continues his streak of well-crafted, effective film performances as he slips seamlessly into the role of the bearded, intelligent, perhaps too forgiving dutiful father. Maura Tierney is outstanding as Nic’s stepmother, who loves him dearly but will not allow his downward spiral to harm her two young children or destroy her marriage. 
 
 Chalamet follows his star-making turns in “Lady Bird,” “Hostiles” and “Call Me by Your Name” with another blazingly strong performance as Nic, a shining star in the making who is turning into a burnt-out shell of a human being day by day, relapse after relapse. 
 
 I’ve seen Chalamet compared to a young Brando, but to me his work is more reminiscent of James Dean — electric and forceful and screen-grabbing, but stunningly vulnerable and real. When Nic is feeling healthy and he’s running through a sprinkler in the family yard on a perfect afternoon, with his adoring little siblings following him like puppies and giggling with pure joy, his father looks at him as if the boy is a god on Earth. When Nic is a skeletal, nearly invisible, dead-eyed shadow on the verge of slipping away forever, his father is at a loss to as to how to help his once beautiful boy. 
 
 Chalamet is asked to hit some big notes in this performance, but we never see him acting. That’s true greatness in the making. 
 
 ‘Beautiful Boy’ 
 
 ★★★ 
 
 Amazon Studios presents a film directed by Felix van Groeningen and written by Luke Davies and van Groeningen. Rated R (for drug content throughout, language, and brief sexual material). Running time: 112 minutes. Opens Friday at local theaters.
– Call Me By Your Name takes viewers to northern Italy in the summer of 1983, where 17-year-old Elio (recent Golden Globe nominee Timothee Chalamet) meets 24-year-old American graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and, well, things heat up. The film by Luca Guadagnino, adapted from the novel by Andre Aciman, has a 96% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Their thoughts: The film is a "generous, sensitive adaptation" of Aciman's novel, benefited by the "ridiculous chemistry" of Hammer and 22-year-old Chalamet, who gives a "beautiful, complex performance." These are just a few of the “million reasons why Call Me By Your Name is far and away the best movie of the year," writes Christy Lemire at RogerEbert.com, who also calls the film "a lush and vibrant masterpiece." It's "a powerfully erotic and affecting love story, albeit one so closely and intimately observed that the term 'slow burn' seems almost inadequate," writes Justin Chang at the Los Angeles Times. "The undercurrents of lust, intrigue, jealousy and sexual anxiety flickering between Elio and Oliver are observed with a precision and playfulness that verge on the Hitchcockian," he adds, but it's the film's "compassion and wry wisdom … that catch you off-guard." It's "a spellbinding, almost ecstatically beautiful movie" that's "almost sinfully enjoyable," to boot, writes Ann Hornaday at the Washington Post. The "timeless" coming-of-age tale "acknowledges the purity and sculptural beauty of youth" but adds plenty of erotic tension. Chalamet brings it all together with "a note-perfect combination of cocky self-assurance and wary naiveté," Hornaday writes. "Chalamet delivers one of the year's best performances" in a film simple in its subject matter, writes Rafer Guzman at Newsday. "It's about two people and their feelings"—"erotic yet never graphic, heartfelt yet highly stylized." Two scenes to watch out for: one featuring "an eyebrow-raising use of a peach," and another in which Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg) "gives a lovely monologue with such purity of emotion that it's almost breathtaking."