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Released in 1968, as his fellow auteurs were battling to keep Henri Langlois in his job at the Cinémathèque Française and cancelling the Cannes Film Festival in support of the Soixante-Huitards, Les Biches wears its Hitchcockian heart on its sleeve with as much class as the vampish Stéphane Audran wears her black, fur-trimmed ensemble, as she seduces penniless Parisian pavement artist, Jacqueline Sassard. However, once the action switches to St Tropez, the sexual tables are turned by architect Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose designs on Audran have murderous consequences. Political allegory, psychological thriller or lesbian vampire erotica - this is open to numerous interpretations. But most agree that it was one of the high points of Audran's career, as it brought her the Best Actress prize at Berlin.

Audran (who was then Mrs Chabrol) also excelled later the same year in La Femme infidèle (1968), which not only reveals the debt that Chabrol owes to Hitchcock, but also his own macabre delight in the less than discreet crimes of the bourgeoisie. Having hired a private eye to follow bored wife Audran, insurance executive Michel Bouquet confronts the man who has cuckolded him. But his bid to treat author Maurice Ronet with disdain backfires as their discussion grows heated and he bludgeons his rival to death and disposes of the body.

However, rather than shop her husband for the murder, Audran is so thrilled by the intensity of his passion that she falls in love with him all over again. Complete with nods to Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), this is very much the work of a cinéaste. But, with Jean Rabier's gliding camera and Pierre Jansen's unsettling score reinforcing the mood of ambiguity, it is also a compelling study of human nature that is laced with coolly ironic black comedy. Adapted from a novel by Nicholas Blake with regular script collaborator Paul Gégauff, Que la Bête Meure (1969) starts out as a whodunit, as widowed children's writer Michel Duchaussoy attempts to track down the hit-and-run driver who killed his eight year-old son. However, in typical Chabrolian style, the tone becomes more psychologically intense, as Duchaussoy falls for Caroline Cellier, the wife of chief suspect Jean Yanne, whose own son, Marc Di Napoli, despises him.

Duchaussoy decides to exact his revenge during a trip to Brittany. But he begins to have misgivings about his plan, as even though Yanne is an oaf, he's not entirely reprehensible. Exploring such recurring themes as guilt, justice and moral responsibility, this is a mischievously malevolent picture that's laced with bullish humour and is superbly photographed by Jean Rabier.

Rabier reunited with the Chabrols for Le Boucher (1969), in which Audran displays surprising vulnerability as a schoolteacher who moves to an idyllic village of Tremolat in the Périgord to forget an unhappy relationship. However, she becomes fond of butcher Jean Yanne after watching him carve a roast at a colleague's wedding. Indeed, she becomes so fascinated by his melancholic obsessiveness and his stories of military service in Algeria and Indo-China that she's unable to resist him, even when his lost lighter persuades her that he is linked to a brutal series of murders.

Rarely has smoking been depicted with such sinister sensuality. But every gesture and expression in this film is loaded with machination and suspense. Yanne is undoubtedly a disturbed individual, but Audran is also scarred and the loneliness that unites them also causes them to bury secrets that neither dares share. The standout scenes focus on Yanne escorting Audran home from the wedding reception and Audran exploring her feelings about primitive men as she leads a school party to the caves at Lascaux. However, Chabrol makes each sequence simmer with menace, most notably when Audran offers Yanne the incriminating lighter she has just taken so calculatingly casually from a drawer.

An adulterous affairs go dangerously awry in Juste Avant la Nuit (1971), a bleak treatise on remorse and self-loathing that opens with middle-aged Michel Bouquet listening with rising disgust to mistress Anna Douking's sado-masochistic fantasies. By the time he wakes, however, he has killed her and, rather than facing up to his crime, he returns home to wife Stéphane Audran and their adorable children. Moreover, he calmly consoles best friend François Périer over the loss of his wife in such a senselessly brutal crime. But, for all his initial sang froid, Bouquet begins to succumb to agonising pangs of guilt and he knows he has to confess to someone.

Culminating in one of the most shocking climaxes of Chabrol's entire career, this calculatingly cynical dissection of civilised mores lays bare the hypocrisy, snobbery and smug suburbanity of the murderously respectable bourgeoisie. The performances are superb, with the devoted Audran and the understanding Perier pitching Bouquet into a living hell of affection and forgiveness. Some may bridle at the chauvinism, but it reflects the corrosive complacency of the characters rather than the director himself.

Less accomplished, but still gruesomely controlled and ferocious in its distaste for its protagonists, Les Noces Rouges (1973) chronicles another illicit liaison. Bored with frigid wife Clothilde Joano, provincial deputy mayor Michel Piccoli embarks upon a passionate fling with boss Claude Piéplu's neglected wife, Stéphane Audran. With Piéplu preoccupied with a dubious land deal, the lovers are free to meet whenever they wish. But their insatiable passion prompts them to kill Joano and, when Piéplu proves inconveniently accommodating about their crime, they dispatch him, too. They seem to have got away with murder, but they hadn't taken the guileless vengefulness of Audran's teenage daughter, Eliana De Santis, into consideration.

Dwelling on Audran and Piccoli's lust in an almost mischievous manner, while also offering satirical insights into the corruption of the French ruling class, this could have been made by Luis Buñuel, Henri-Georges Clouzot or Alfred Hitchcock. Chabrol probably has too much fun at the adulterers' expense, especially when he allows their sense of civic duty to be their undoing. However, the performances are splendid, with Piéplu revelling in the role of a small-time schemer seeking to exploit his wife's infidelity and deputy's disloyalty to facilitate his own chicanery.

Adapted from a novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, Nada (1974) combines a Costa-Gavras-style conspiracy thriller with a Godardian satire on designer politics and police incompetence. Indeed, this could also be seen as a parody of La Chinoise (1967), as it so mercilessly mocks revolutionaries Fabio Testi, Maurice Garrel, Michel Duchaussoy, Lou Castel, Mariangela Melato and Didier Kaminka as they plan to kidnap the American ambassador from a Parisian brothel and wind up killing a gendarme during the bungled attempt. However, Chabrol is even more contemptuous of thuggish lawman Michel Aumont and Minister of the Interior André Falcon, as they attempt to round-up the gang while protecting their own backs.

These eight titles are contained in the first volume of The Claude Chabrol Collection. The second encapsulates Chabrol's jaundiced attitude towards the French bourgeoisie. Moreover, it suggests that Chabrol's fecundity and popularity contributed to his devaluation by less perceptive critics. Yet even when he's not on top form, Chabrol was still able to produce pictures to enthral, unnerve and entertain. And just below the surface of them all, there's a layer of corrosive satire that's occasionally worthy of Buñuel.

Inspired by Charlotte Armstrong's pulp novel, The Balloon Man, La Rupture (1970) forms part of the `Hélène cycle' that he made with Stéphane Audran. It centres on the abuse suffered by a former stripper at the hands of drug-addicted husband Jean-Claude Drouot and father-in-law Michel Bouquet, as they try to discredit her divorce suit. Paul Gégauff, plays an equally monstrous spouse (with perhaps even more relish) in Une Partie de Plaisir (1974), which disconcertingly co-stars his ex-wife Danielle, as the target of his murderous rage after a demand for an open marriage backfires.

The best laid plans of a treacherous partner also go awry in Les Innocents aux Mains Sales (1975), as no sooner have Romy Schneider and St Tropez lover Paolo Giusti bumped off her rich and boorish husband (Rod Steiger) than he keeps coming back to haunt them. A hybrid of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Les Diaboliques, this nasty chiller finds echo in the policier Poulet au Vinaigre (aka Cop au Vin, 1984). But there's a lighter tone to the espionage caper, La Route de Corinthe (1967), in which Jean Seberg has to find the black boxes that will prove she didn't kill spy husband, Christian Marquand.

Completing the set is The Flower of Evil (2003). Although Chabrol sustained his career with thrillers in the Hitchcock mode, he was at his best dissecting the foibles and failings of the French bourgeoisie. His real targets here are those seemingly respectable bastions who harbour the neo-fascist prejudices that have scarred Gallic society since the Nazi occupation.

What's most notable about this compelling study of class arrogance is the restraint and precision of Chabrol's satire, whether he's commenting on the careless affluence of womanising pharmacist Bernard Le Coq's semi-incestuous family, or the complacent naivety of Nathalie Baye's campaign for mayor of their Bordeaux neighbourhood. But stealing the show is Suzanne Flon's immaculate display as the matriarch whose good-natured indulgence of her ghastly relations belies a guilty secret. Mercilessly acute and quietly devastating.

Artificial Eye also a couple of collections available under the title The Essential Claude Chabrol. Inspector Lavardin (1986) is the sequel to Cop au Vin and makes for a satisfyingly twisting blend of whodunit and morality tale, as Jean Poiret reunites with old flame Bernadette Lafont after her writer husband is found dead on the beach of their sleepy seaside town with the word `pig' written on his back in lipstick.

With skeletons tumbling out of the deceased's closet and a travelling theatre troupe incurring the wrath of the local worthies who took exception to their sacrilegious production, this Dominique Roulet adaptation finds echo in Betty (1992), a typical astute and acerbic Georges Simenon story, in which dire secrets emerge after widow Stéphane Audran rescues chain-smoking drunk Marie Trintignant from a Versailles drug addict and whisks her off to The Hole, a bar for society's victims run by Audran's beau, Jean-François Garreaud. Simenon had challenged Chabrol to make a film without a plot. However, incidents abound here, especially when Trintignant reveals how she was manoeuvred into a divorce by the wealthy family that had enticed her into providing them with heirs and then taken exception to the libidinous behaviour that will inevitably prompt her to make a move on Garreaud.

Based on a 1948 Charlotte Armstrong novel, Merci pour le Chocolat (2000), harks back to his glory days of the 1960s, with its assured mix of social satire and mischievous suspense. Did Isabelle Huppert really dope her best friend to reclaim her pianist husband, Jacques Dutronc? And is she now trying to finish off Anna Mouglalis, the teenage protégé, who was reportedly mixed-up at birth with Dutronc's determinedly non-musical son, Rodolphe Pauly? Ultimately, the facts of the case matter less than the pitilessly precise manner in which Chabrol slices through the veneer of bourgeois respectability to reveal the poisonous emotions simmering beneath the surface. But Huppert's superbly controlled display of murderous vulnerability ensures that malice has a very human face.

Huppert also headlines the opener of the second triptych. Inspired by the misdeeds of Marie-Louise Girard, The Story of Women (1988) shows how the desperation that prompts Huppert to become a backstreet abortionist in a Nazi-occupied Norman town is gradually replaced by avarice, arrogance and recklessness, as she moves into a well-appointed apartment, colludes with prostitute Marie Trintignant and neglects shell-shocked husband François Cluzet for collaborator Nils Tavernier.

But just as Chabrol refuses to judge Huppert's behaviour (even after her blasphemous prayer to the Virgin Mary), he makes oleaginous game show host Philippe Noiret seem appealingly gregarious in Masques (1987), even though he is clearly mistreating ward Anne Brochet and may be responsible for the disappearance of writer Robin Renucci's sister. Making masterly use of Noiret's estate, Chabrol evokes both Simenon and Hitchcock as he gleefully plays fast and loose with thriller convention.

And he similarly bends the rules of the whodunit in The Colour of Lies (1999), as Breton police inspector Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi's investigation into the rape and murder of a 10 year-old girl brings her into contact with embittered artist Jacques Gamblin, his vivacious wife Sandine Bonnaire, pompous tele-journalist Antoine de Caunes, shopkeepers Bulle Ogier and Noel Simsolo, and petty crook Pierre Marlot. Alternating Eduardo Serra's sublime Breton landscapes with tight close-ups and lacing the cerebral suspense with dark wit, Chabrol again lays bare the petty prejudices and peccadilloes that make the middle classes such a tempting target for his piercing gaze.

Several other Chabrol titles are also available individually.

In his pictures with Stéphane Audran pictures, Chabrol's eye for detail created a diegetic authenticity that made his methodical leaking of information all the more persuasively unnerving. Moreover, there was always a sly wit lurking beneath the polished visuals that made his work so irresistible. Unfortunately, Madame Bovary (1991), his third collaboration with Isabelle Huppert, didn't work quite as well. Indeed, their resolute fidelity to Flaubert's novel makes this a less effective film than previous adaptations by Jean Renoir and Vincente Minnelli.

As the doctor's wife tempted into adultery by the tedium of rural life, Huppert brilliantly conveys the stifled passions that bring about her ruin, while Chabrol uses all his psychological insight to expose the social and moral rigidity of the mid-19th century. Yet this internality and literariness prevent us from engaging with the action and leave us the sole option of admiring the art of both actress and director.

He also missed his step slightly with L'Enfer (1994). Working from a script by Henri-Georges Clouzot (whose failure to reach the screen was outlined in Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's exemplary documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno), Chabrol indulges his passion for Hitchcockian mischief in this story of a country hotelier whose inability to accept his wife's love tips him into insane jealousy. He exploits Emmanuelle Béart radiant sensuality as shrewdly as he manipulates François Cluzet's self-lacerating suspicion. But his cunning concealment of the truth can't disguise the melodramatic nature and psychological shallowness of this otherwise polished diversion.

Chabrol's debts to Hitchcock and Fritz Lang are readily evident in La Cérémonie (1995), a glowering adaptation of Ruth Rendell's A Judgment in Stone. However, there's also a hint of Renoir in his benevolent attitude to both illiterate maid Sandrine Bonnaire and her feisty postmistress accomplice Isabelle Huppert and their hapless bourgeois victims, Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Cassel. Consequently, this is a surprisingly compassionate study of a pitiless crime. Superbly acted and directed with a thriller master's finesse, this dastardly delight stands in marked contrast to Rien ne vas plus (1997), a teasing comedy thriller that is slyly slick and endlessly amusing.

As ever, a twist of Hitchcock flavours proceedings, as con partners Isabelle Huppert and Michel Serrault roam the convention circuit in a camper van. However, from the moment Huppert involves them in treasurer François Cluzet's plan to swindle his multinational boss Jean-François Balmer out of 5 million Swiss francs, we're never quite sure who's scamming who and in what combinations. Ultimately, the charade isn't as complex as the ones in House of Games or Nine Queens. But the byplay between Huppert and Serrault is delectable and some of the set-pieces are classic Hitch-Chabrol, most notably the sequence at the dance recital.

Some of the digs at Switzerland's sobriety are very droll, too (perhaps fuelled by the fact that the onetime enfant terrible of the nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard, had become a Swiss citizen). Huppert neatly plays against her trademark impassivity throughout, but it's the twinkling Serrault who steals the show by embodying the director's own glancing legerdemain. A minor delight.

Released in 2004, The Bridesmaid, Chabrol's second attempt at capturing Ruth Rendell's relentlessly sinister vision of small-town mores recalls La Cérémonie, in that Laura Smet's femme fatale intrudes upon an already fragmenting domestic routine and reduces it to rubble. However, she lacks Isabelle Huppert's genius for irresistible mystery - consequently, it's difficult to see why sales rep Benoît Magimel would veer so completely off the rails simply because she bears a resemblance to a garden statue his mother (Aurore Clément) gave to her now-vanished lover.

As ever, Chabrol develops the situation with sly restraint, while Eduardo Serra's cinematography generates a palpable sense of provincial menace that intensifies after Smet suggests they perform mutual murders to prove their passion. But, ultimately, Rendell's storyline offers too few surprises.

He bounced back to form, however, with The Comedy of Power (2006). Indeed, Chabrol marked his half-century in cinema with this characteristically acerbic swipe at bourgeois ethics, in which the always compelling Isabelle Huppert excels as an examining magistrate, whose sudden celebrity during the investigation of a corrupt oil company enhances her fearsome reputation, while also impinging deleteriously upon her personal life.

This is another masterly blend of teasing satire and socio-moral scepticism from Hitchcock's most devout disciple, which exploits the Macguffin of a true-life corporate scandal to explore the links between government and big business and the extent to which breeding and gender determine the prospects of those operating in France's upper echelons. It's fascinating stuff. But the subplots involving Huppert's estrangement from overshadowed spouse Robin Renucci and her curious relationship with wastrel nephew Thomas Chabrol don't quite catch light.

Finally, Chabrol permitted a wisp of despairing fondness for the old class enemy to permeate The Girl Cut in Two (2007). Nobody did this sort of sophisticated satirical savagery better. Yet this reworking of the 1906 Stanford White scandal that inspired Richard Fleischer's The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) is not as pitilessly incisive as past assaults on the narcissistic bourgeoisie.

There's a grim fascination in watching rakish novelist François Berléand and indolent pharmaceutical heir Benoît Magimel competing for the affections of ingenuous weathergirl, Ludivine Sagnier. But Sagnier is too docile to possess the requisite femme fatality of a noir anti-heroine, while Berléand's literary and marital reputations never really seem imperilled by his arrogant folly. The storytelling is impeccable, however, and Chabrol's insights into the transience of trust, the marginalisation of books in an age of electronic media and the celebrity class's craving for the deference abnegated by society's traditional powerbrokers are typically trenchant. So while this may not be a masterwork, it's still clearly the work of a master.