Grade: B+

The late Claude Chabrol might be smiling from above at the thought that his mantle has been taken up so skillfully by writer-director Alain Guiraudie, who brings the older filmmaker’s characteristic mood of quiet menace in a cultured environment to this tale of lust and murder at a remote lakeside that serves as a gay cruising ground—a story with elements that are also reminiscent of the narrative style of Patricia Highsmith.

In a series of leisurely widescreen tableaux exquisitely shot by Claire Mathon, the film opens on a sunny summer’s day, introducing Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a handsome young man, as he parks, saunters through the woods to the beach, takes off his clothes and wades into the lake for a swim. Other men wander about through the trees or along the shore looking for signs from sunbathers or like-minded wanderers that a quick assignation might be in order. Noticing an overweight, unattractive older man sitting apart from anybody else, Franck swims back and joins him for some small talk. It turns out that the fellow, Henri (Patrick D’Assumcao), is a recently divorced vacationer who’s not looking to score but enjoys Franck’s company. Franck’s attention is diverted, however, when he spies Michel (Christophe Paou), a well-muscled guy with a major mustache, and is instantly intrigued by him. He follows Michel into the woods, only to find him engaged with another man, and exits the scene even as others are eying him.

During the following days, the three men settle into a pattern, with Franck and Henri conversing and Franck watching Michel until he takes a chance and introduces himself. That brings a reaction from another fellow who appears to be Michel’s jealous boyfriend and leads him off into the woods. That doesn’t deter Franck, however, who begins obsessively to observe the two until he sees something awful—the pair engaging in some horseplay in the water that turns into an apparent confrontation in which Michel drowns the man.

Franck’s reaction, however, is to grow even more impassioned over the thought of Michel. While continuing to talk with Henri—conversations that touch on loneliness, sex and obsession—he approaches Michel again and the two quickly are engaged in intense activity beneath the branches. What he’s witnessed haunts Franck, but though he questions Michel gingerly about the missing man, the killer is nonchalant—until the body is discovered and a police inspector (Jerome Chappette) shows up, asking questions. A thin, reedy fellow with unusually expressive hands, he prods both men to give him information, but they—along with the other regulars—offer no answers. Meanwhile Franck grows increasingly needy, wanting more than sex from Michel; but Michel refuses, saying that he needs to be discreet. And the tension between them, exacerbated by the inspector’s intrusions, begins to fester.

“Stranger by the Lake” isn’t a whodunit, of course—we’ve seen Michel commit the crime, just as Franck has. But it is a mystery, one concerned with larger issues of human needs and motives, addressed both through Franck and Henri’s colloquies and through the portrayal of the erotic rituals of searching, refusal and acceptance that the men circling one another in the forest perform. Why does Franck place himself in obvious danger in pursuit of fulfilling an obsessive, inexplicable desire? What drives paunchy, depressed Henri to come to the beach day after day, though he never evinces a desire to connect sexually with Franck or anyone else, and doesn’t even take a swim or go au naturel, as virtually all the other habitués of the lakeside idyll do? Still more generally, the film ruminates on the relationship between sex and death, something made especially acute by being situated in a gay environment where unprotected sex is the norm for some while terrifying others.

In the final reels, Guiraudie takes a more conventional turn, especially with the police investigation, which naturally causes a rift between Franck and Michel that invites Henri’s protective side. But even here anyone looking for a comfortably realistic denouement will be disappointed; this is a film of questions, not answers, and it maintains its oblique, suggestive character to the very end. It’s extremely graphic in its depiction of acts of sexual intimacy, which some may dismiss as pornographic in all but name. And its occasional flashes of mordant humor—particularly in scenes involving a voyeur (Mathieu Vervisch) who masturbates while watching panting couples but who’s uncommonly considerate of those who object, and genteel after actually engaging with another human being—will unsettle some viewers rather than bringing a nervous smile to their lips.

But Guiraudie observes it all with almost clinical detachment, as though performing anthropological research on an exotic culture that always remains as tantalizingly out of reach of our understanding as some objects of desire on the beach do from those who cast desperate glances at them. This is an extraordinarily atmospheric, unsettling film that raises mysteries that, in the end, remain defiantly insoluble.

History takes a beating in “300: Rise of an Empire,” and viewers get a pretty good pummeling, too. This loud, in-your-face sequel to “300” is another wacky, CGI-dominated, ultra-macho bloodbath, based on a second (as yet unpublished) graphic novel by Frank Miller, who continues his comic-book trashing of the second Persian invasion of Greece, moving on from the battle of Thermopylae at which Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and his Spartan host perished, to that of Salamis, where the Greek naval forces triumphed, but pausing to add a flashback to the battle of Marathon ten years earlier.

The hero this time around is the Athenian Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton), portrayed by Herodotus—the basic historical source—as a wily, manipulative politician but here transformed into a brawny Braveheart stand-in. According to this telling, Themistocles was the victor at Marathon, even killing the Persian king Darius (Igal Naor) with a miraculous long-distance arrow shot. (In truth, though Themistocles was one of ten generals at Marathon, the victory was the work of Miltiades and Callimachus, and Darius wasn’t even there. His forces were commanded by a general named Datis.)

The task of subduing the Greeks eventually fell to Darius’ son Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who in this telling takes on a superhuman persona by undergoing a rite of passage in the desert under the direction of Artemisia (Eva Green), an orphaned Greek who was brought up as a daughter by Darius and trained as his most skilled and ruthless warrior. (In reality, Artemisia was a Greek queen in Asia Minor who was in effect a Persian vassal—and a relative of Herodotus, who emphasized her role in the invading host, as well as her nobility and honor. And Xerxes was hardly the rock-star type weirdo portrayed here.)

Much of the action this time around is at sea, with Themistocles first besting Artemisia, but then being defeated by her, at what is presumably intended to be a depiction of the battle of Artemisium, fought roughly simultaneously with Thermopylae. (The battle tactics are ludicrously wrong, but so what?) That’s followed by Themistocles’ pleas to the widowed Spartan queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) to join the fight with her city’s fleet (Sparta was a land-locked city with meager naval power, of course) and bring the Greeks together in a single nation to defeat the invader.

After an abortive effort by Artemisia to seduce Themistocles—the occasion for a sweaty sex scene—there follows the decisive battle of Salamis, in which the Greeks triumph. Once again the depiction is nonsensical, since Themistocles’ strategy was actually to lure the much larger Persian fleet into the confined straits so that his smaller, more maneuverable triremes could ram the cluster of clumsier vessels; here it’s played out on a great expanse of sea that makes the victory due to Gorgo’s arrival, like a last minute cavalry charge on the waves. Of course, there’s a last-act face-off between Themistocles and Artemisia that never happened; she survived the battle and returned home with Xerxes’ favor, though in escaping an assault by a Greek ship she rammed a Persian vessel.

It should be clear from this that Miller, and the screenplay that Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad derived from his book, have retained only the barest of historical bones and fashioned a story of Themistocles and Salamis even more fanciful than the one than the original “300” told about Leonidas and Thermopylae. That’s really a pity, since the tale told by Herodotus might have made a compelling screen narrative. But setting all that aside, the question that remains is simply whether “300: Rise of an Empire” is entertaining in its own flashy, brainless way.

The answer is: not very. As directed by Noam Murro—whose only previous film, the clever “Smart People,” makes this one look dumb indeed—it’s an unremitting cacophony of noise, action and gore, replete with decapitations and garish splashes of blood (none of it helped by the 3D that darkens and muddies everything) and pausing periodically for someone to deliver pseudo-grandiose pronouncements. Technically it follows the pattern of its predecessor, with the actors combined with digitally-constructed backgrounds so that everything looks as artificial as a comic-book panel—though Murro and cinematographer Simon Duggan employ lots more camera movement than Snyder, who presented “300” more as a series of tableaux, did.

As for the cast, only Green, who camps it up mightily as Artemisia, makes much of an impression—it’s a totally over-the-top performance, but at least is energetic. By contrast Stapleton is rather a stick, though he exhibits impressive pectoral muscles, and Santoro again merely strikes a series of poses. There isn’t much that’s notable among the other Greek defenders of liberty; we get a father-and-son team called Scyllias and Calisto (Callan Mulvey and James O’Connell) who are obviously designed to represent sacrifice for the national cause, and the tragedian Aeschylus shows up in the person of Hans Matheson (Aeschylus actually fought at Marathon, but what the hey). Andrew Tiernan appears in heavy makeup to play the Greek Ephialtes, who betrayed Leonidas, but his face, a plastic mask, isn’t noticeably less animated than those of actors not so encumbered. Even David Wenham, a carryover from the previous picture, is surprisingly anonymous as Gorgo’s counselor Dilios. A bombastic score by Junkie XL churns away relentlessly, assaulting the ears as a complement to the film’s attack on the eyes.

With its video-game style, “300” attracted a substantial fan base, who will probably turn out for this sequel too. They’re likely to leave a mite disappointed, though not as much as anybody with the slightest knowledge of the real story behind the battle of Salamis, which was a lot more interesting than what you see here.