Leos Carax (born Alex Christophe Dupont), the French filmmaker who has made just six features in a career stretching back almost 40 years, is one of cinema’s most enigmatic auteurs. Key director of the Cinéma du look movement, alongside Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix, Carax has shown punky visions of French underground culture.

Madness and wonder have been Carax’s stock-in-trade since he burst onto the arthouse scene with the black and white filmBoy Meets Girl (1984). The filmmaker followed his debut with experimental film noir Mauvais Sang, one-of-a-kind romantic Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, controversial Pola X, his magnum opus Holy Motors, and his first English-language film Annette.

Let’s take a look at every Leos Carax film, ranked.

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6 Boy Meets Girl

     Cinecom Pictures

Following in the footsteps of his predecessors within the French New Wave, Carax began his career at 23 with the Godard-esque monochrome drama Boy Meets Girl. A nocturnal odyssey of lost souls, this 1984 film tells a bittersweet story about a depressed young filmmaker Alex (Denis Lavant) and a suicidal young woman Mireille (Mireille Perrier) who find each other in their most fragile state.

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

Boy Meets Girl is serving as the first film within Carax’s unofficial Alex trilogy. In each of the director’s first three films (Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang, and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf), Carax’s alter ego, French actor Denis Lavant plays different incarnations of Alex. An ode to unbearable fragility and alienated youth, the Alex trilogy as a whole and Boy Meets Girl, in particular, is a great introduction to the filmmaker’s work.

5 Pola X

     AMLF

After the poetic charm of the Alex trilogy, Carax presented a more cynical and controversial film, 1999’s drama Pola X. Pola X is associated with New French Extremity cinema, a movement with transgressive films that shocked the public and critics. Loosely based on the Herman Melville novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, Carax’s fourth film carries drama to more extreme lengths and handles the theme of incest.

Pola X follows a young writer Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu), who lives with his widowed mother (Catherine Deneuve). Things are going well until Pierre encounters a mysterious woman, Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva), who tells him that she is his long-lost sister. “With Pola X, a noisy epic swirl of breast-beating, hair-tearing angst and portentous symbolism, Leos Carax captures the dubious title of French cinema’s reigning mad romantic,” The New York Times wrote.

4 Mauvais Sang

     AAA Classics

1986’s Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood), playfully toying with film-noir tropes, follows a troubled young man Alex (Denis Lavant) who is tasked to steal a virus culture that works against a mysterious sexually transmitted disease, STBO, which kills people who have sex without love. Over the course of the film, Alex fall for Anna (Juliette Binoche), the lover of his partner-in-crime. A sort of sci-fi-thriller-romance, Carax’s second film, is clearly influenced by the AIDS Epidemic, which rose steadily through the 1980s.

3 Les Amants du Pont-Neuf

     Gaumont

Carax takes the theme of desperate romanticism to the next conceivable level with the last film of the Alex trilogy, 1991’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge). It is an epic love story between two vagrants, a hard-drinking Alex (Denis Lavant) and a painter with failing eyesight Michele (Juliette Binoche), set on Paris’ oldest bridge.

The setting ended up being the source of the film’s production difficulties and budget woes. After the end of the permission to shoot on the bridge, Carax and his team had to reconstruct the bridge and its surroundings in the south of France to finish filming. This made brutally honest and bold Les Amants du Pont-Neuf one of the most expensive French films ever.

2 Annette

     UGC

“Why don’t people in musicals fuck?” IndieWire quoted Carax. “It’s not a rule, but it seems weird. Probably because it’s an old genre.” With his first English-language film, bizarre rock opera Annette, the French auteur re-imagined and deconstructed the musical genre.

Premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where Carax received the Best Director award, Annette follows a pernicious stand-up comedian Henry (Adam Driver) and his wife, a world-famous opera singer Ann (Marion Cotillard). After the birth of their first child Annette, portrayed by a marionette puppet, Henry’s and Ann’s ill-starred romance spirals into scandal. Truly hypnotic cinematic experience, Annette is a unique and special film about unbridled emotion.

1 Holy Motors

     Les Films du Losange

Mind-boggling, weird, and captivating, the 2012 fantasy drama Holy Motors is the most critically praised film in Carax’s filmography. The drama with cinephile allusions to Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and other great movies is both a film about film and a tribute to cinema.

Holy Motors stars the director’s favorite Denis Lavant as Mr. Oscar, who takes on nine different roles, ranging from the banker to the beggar, from the killer to the killed. Mr. Oscar seems to be playing strange roles, but there are no cameras. So, Lavant’s chameleonic hero journeys from one life to the next and tries to have the whole range of human experiences in the span of a single day. Described by The Guardian as “a gripping surrealist odyssey that makes most other films look very buttoned-up,” Holy Motors may be the maddest film you will ever see.