This latest effort feels more like an efficiently polished return to the director's themes from earlier titles, where pernicious, peripheral villains constantly threaten distinctively rural settings.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 4, 2019

Guiraudie frequently abandons the audience in the story - we drift in and out of the narrative just as Léo drifts in and out of people's lives - but for all of the film's self-infatuation, it also offers no shortage of deeply disturbing show-stoppers.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 29, 2019

It's also a film about desire and frustration -- there are sexual relationships between the four main characters in varying permutations that ebb and flow throughout the film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 19, 2019

... only in the end does the film establish its own mood: a mixture of the hope of "The King of Escape" and the danger of "Stranger by the Lake."

| Nov 10, 2018

The largely aimless countryside jaunt that is Staying Vertical is saved from the scrapheap purely because of its intoxicating absurdism.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 10, 2018

Confounding and enchanting.

| Aug 21, 2018

Oddball experimental dreamy film that offers some comical and serious observations over sex and life and wolves.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 30, 2018

Staying Vertical is a pun that might work in French but in English translates as "audience indifference." That's too bad, because this wild, original film deserves to be seen.

| Apr 26, 2018

... worth watching for those moments of high provocation, because you're simply not going to see them anywhere else.

| Jan 31, 2018

The episode brings to Staying Vertical's surface the mild and charming phantasmagoria in which our noncommittal hero seems to float.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 19, 2017

A digressive and whimsical story centered on the romantic / sexual encounters / disagreements of a blocked scriptwriter who seeks the meaning of his life through the flesh, not the spirit. [Full review in Spanish]

| Aug 17, 2017

Guiraudie demystifies sex as a visual spectacle by reducing it to the animal, though that's not to say it can't take on a spiritual dimension.

| Jun 20, 2017

Guiraudie brings an enigmatic beauty to the physical landscapes and Léo's spiritual transformation and a sour twist to his satire on artistic purity in a world where wolves pick off the stragglers and loners abandoned to the wilds.

| Jun 14, 2017

The director demonstrates a formal maturity in the thematic that nullifies all seriousness of the film showing its humor. [Full review in Spanish]

| May 4, 2017

The strange action plays out with a dreamlike lucidity reminiscent of late Luis Buñuel... It's also dreamlike in its handling of time; the film takes place over a few years but feels as if it transpires over a few days.

| Apr 20, 2017

It's a movie in which characters seem to be doing things, speaking to each other, but no one ever seems alive.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 24, 2017

Guiraudie has created an extraordinary queer comedy about fate, death and single-minded predatory drive. Staying Vertical is worth thinking about a lot.

| Mar 3, 2017

[Staying Vertical lacks Stranger by the Lake's] urgency and economy, but makes up for it by making its countryside feel almost as ominous as that film's lake.

| Mar 2, 2017

For all the characters' predatory bluster, they're just sheep in no clothing.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 1, 2017

It's not all that interesting.

| Jan 25, 2017