While Funny Games takes us on an entirely unpleasant journey, it at least plays with form and forces us to question our role in the entire disturbing affair. Long takes and patient pacing force us to reckon with the horrors unfolding on the screen.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 15, 2024

Haneke's audacious home invasion film is as confronting as it is effective. This is a masterclass.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 3, 2023

It’s a disturbing thriller that I found to be smart and compelling but also brutally painful and sometimes emotionally unbearable.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

[Funny Games] uses the narrative of a typical slasher film set within the confines of a home and makes fun of the set expectations and clichés in the audience's mind.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 24, 2021

Sick, twisted, and incomparably sadistic, Michael Haneke's film is a viewing experience unlike any witnessed before.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 13, 2020

Galvanizing, unsettling and deeply disturbing, the Austrian director's first stint in the Cannes competition went on to define his particular trajectory of cinematic miserabilism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2020

Yet we, as the audience, are invited to participate in their amoral game, and soon we have to question our own feelings, lest they stray too close to the vicious antagonists we are rooting against.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 6, 2019

a viciously effective polemic against the placid acceptance of film violence, a perverse experiment in audience manipulation that lures us into watching what should be unwatchable and then draws our attention to our unexamined desires

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 20, 2019

What follows is basically Hostel with subtitles, and, given the very nature of Haneke's experiment, it's not hard to figure out exactly how this will end.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 20, 2019

Ultimately, the film confronts why we consume horror, questioning the viewer subtly every so often between the brutality: why are you still watching?

| May 1, 2019

Haneke's films are famously pessimistic, blackhearted affairs that peel back the thin veneer of politesse hiding human monstrosity. This isn't his best movie, but it is his most viscerally frightening.

| Mar 4, 2019

So much of it is elevated to engrossing observation because it is a movie that takes these ideas seriously, not as tools meant to turn a stomach.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 26, 2016

The first half is sadistically intense, Geiring and Frisch make wonderfully creepy psychopaths, and Haneke and cinematographer Jurgen Jurges burnish the film to a high polish that's rare for the genre.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 20, 2012

A sort of Austrian art-house Cape Fear by way of the new Cinema of Cruelty.

| Aug 21, 2009

The film outstays its welcome and is more than a little too knowing in its manipulation of standard audience expectations for the genre.

| Mar 26, 2009

Haneke's film doesn't invite audience exploration; it pummels them with preordained conclusions.

| Original Score: D+ | Mar 20, 2008

What Haneke has actually done is to satirize the complex relationship between the story and the audience. On that level it's a triumph.

| Original Score: A | Mar 13, 2008

Haneke has rational reasons for his movie's violence, but he still crosses lines more often than he justifies crossing them.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 10, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 25, 2007

Haneke's snooty admonishments are disturbing because they're never self-critical.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 3, 2006