Results tagged “michaelhaneke”

The AFS retrospective of Michael Haneke's films concludes tonight with Caché (Hidden), a film which was lauded by critics yet went largely unseen during a national release just over a year ago. Haneke's insistence on audience discomfort probably has a lot to do with this, as he calls into question everything from Western abuse of wealth (by the French) to the inherent goodness of children. The film begins with a videotape of a Parisian...

Tonight, as the fifth installment in their Spaces Between Realities: the Films of Michael Haneke series, the Austin Film Society presents Code: Unknown – Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, starring Juliette Binoche. Code: Unknown begins with a group of hearing impaired children playing a seemingly commonplace game of charades, and what is immediately apparent is that these bright young things cannot identify the emotional state that is being acted out in front of them; a...

Director Michael Haneke is best known for 2005's Caché, which used a cool, detached style to examine the effects of a stalker on a wealthy but dysfunctional Parisian family. This uncomfortable subject matter was explored by Haneke in much more bombastic fashion nine years earlier in Funny Games. A sort of meta-mixtape of Straw Dogs, Cape Fear, and A Clockwork Orange, the film wonders aloud why audiences respond to fear, violence, and torture. The...

Tonight, as part of their Spaces Between Realities: the Films of Michael Haneke series, the Austin Film Society presents Benny's Video, the chilling and controversial second installment in Haneke's "emotional glaciation" trilogy. The film follows Benny, a teenage boy whose obsession with a violent home-video ostensibly leads him to commit his own heinous act of violent destruction. But like many of Haneke's films, the most terrifying part isn't the violence itself (very little graphic violence...

We saw both Freedomland and Caché this past weekend. One we loved, the other, not so much. Can you guess which is which? Okay, you got us, we are gluttons for arty French films. And yet, we always show up for the American thrillers, despite low scores on Metacritic. These two films actually do have something in common. They both deal with race and how racism affects the lives of individuals, directly or indirectly. Of...