Collections/March 2025

The Tantalizing Tales of Alain Guiraudie

To mark the release of his acclaimed latest, Misericordia , we’re revisiting the daring, dreamlike, darkly comic, and defiantly queer films of director Alain Guiraudie, who has carved out a distinctive place within French cinema through his transgressive explorations of sex, desire, death, and alienation. While his (homo)erotically charged That Old Dream That Moves was hailed by no less than Jean-Luc Godard as the best film at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, it wasn’t until more than a decade later that Guiraudie made his international breakthrough with the art-house hit Stranger by the Lake , a spellbinding, open-air thriller that merged Hitchcockian menace with an explicit gay gaze. Refusing to tame his wildest impulses for commercial appeal, Guiraudie’s follow-ups, the surreal rural fairy tale Staying Vertical and the idiosyncratic sex comedy Nobody’s Hero , display the audacious tonal shifts and underlying sense of mystery that make his work uniquely fascinating.

5 films — 2 on the Channel, 3 unavailable