[rating=4]
Cert: 18 • France: 100 min • Les Films du Worso • February 21, 2014

Alain Guiraudie’s ‘L’Inconnnu du lac (Stranger By The Lake)’ is an elegant, provocative, genre-crossing film. It’s also eye-poppingly explicit.

“Stranger By The Lake might have the feel of a particularly classy porn flick were in not for the diverse bodies it presents, and for the director’s careful attention to the nuances of all aspects of the men’s conduct and contact.”

2012 Retrospective

Michael Langan looks back at Cruising (1980), the film from which Travis Mathews and James Franco re-imagine lost footage in Interior. Leather Bar.

“The film plays not only on social fears of homosexuality but also on an individual, internalised fear of being queer, reflecting it all back to us in the killer’s mirrored shades that Steve also begins to wear.”

Tenderness, Intimacy and Sex.

In the first of Polari’s exclusive Sundance 2013 coverage, Michael Langan writes about the films of Travis Mathews and the film maker’s current collaboration with James Franco.

“On the Interior. Leather Bar website Travis has written, “… it’s the slippery way in which boundaries and definitions are in constant flux that really make it a queer film for me”, and it’s this kind of thought-provoking statement that puts his work at the vanguard of an exciting moment in new queer cinema.”