Acclaimed filmmaker Michael Haneke's disturbing film portrays the alienation of a young boy, whose experience of the world is refracted through the lens of his video camera and his television screen. Arno Frisch, plays the 14 year-old Benny, who brings a girl home to his parents' empty apartment where he commits a shocking act of casual violence. As with his later ‘Funny Games', Haneke poses provocative and challenging questions about voyeurism and violence - both actual and imagined.
Two violent young men take a mother, father, and son hostage in their vacation cabin and force them to play sadistic "games" with one another for their own amusement.
A series of events unfold like a chain reaction, all stemming from a minor event that brings the film's five characters together. Set in Paris, France, Anne is an actress whose boyfriend Georges photographs the war in Kosovo. Georges' brother, Jean, is looking for the entry code to Georges' apartment. These characters' lives interconnect with a Romanian immigrant and a deaf teacher.
Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Conservatory in Vienna. In her early forties, she lives at home, cooped up with her mother, whose influence Erika escapes only on her regular visits to porn cinemas and peepshows. Her sexuality is an affair of morbid voyeurism and masochistic self-mutilation. Erika and life travel separate paths. Until one day, one of her students gets it into his head to seduce her...
The time preceding the apocalypse is known in Germanic mythology as the time of the wolves. Fleeing a disaster, a middle-class family travel to their countryside holiday home, believing themselves to be escaping the consequences of the general state of chaos, but they find it occupied by strangers.
Michael Haneke was awarded the Best Director prize at Cannes for his stunning exploration of a past that haunts the present.
This utterly compelling psychological thriller from Michael Haneke (Happy End, The White Ribbon) - one of cinema’s most daring, original and controversial directors - stars Daniel Auteuil as Georges, a TV presenter who begins to receive mysterious and alarming packages containing covertly filmed videos of himself and his family.
To the mounting consternation of Georges and his wife (Juliette Binoche), the footage on the tapes – which arrive wrapped in drawings of disturbingly violent images – becomes increasingly personal, and sinister anonymous phone calls are made. Convinced he knows the identity of the person responsible, Georges embarks on a rash and impulsive course of action that throws up some unpleasant facts about his past and leads to shockingly unexpected consequences.
Themes of guilt and denial haunt this riveting Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece by Funny Games and Amour director Michael Haneke
In a village in Protestant northern Germany on the eve of World War I, a series of unsettling and distressing incidents take place. Taken together, they assume the character of a ritual in which punishment and torture dominate. But the identity of the perpetrators remains a mystery. A schoolteacher who has observed the unfolding incidents investigates and, little by little, discovers the disturbing truth. Are we being asked to consider whether these events heralded something that would explode years later with the rise of Nazi Germany? Did these events contain the germs of the tragedies that followed? Haneke has never been one to give us answers, often leaving us with more questions at the end of his film.
★★★★★ “A tightly-wound, fully-fleshed and thoroughly mesmerising drama” - Sukhdev Sandhu, The Telegraph
Michael Haneke's 2013 Oscar- and Palme d'Or-winning drama ‘Amour' follows an elderly couple facing their greatest challenge yet. A police unit breaks into a Paris apartment and discover the body of an elderly woman (Emmanuelle Riva). Her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is nowhere to be found. We then jump back in time to one of their last outings together before Anne becomes incapacitated as a result of an illness. What we witness is the cost of love – not the romance of cinema, but the day-to- day activity of caring for another person, no matter the physical or emotional cost.Michael Haneke's most sensitive film refuses to pull any punches in his depiction of the ageing process, but avoids sensation in favour of empathy. This is deeply humane, profoundly moving cinema.