Funny Games

A Vicious Attack on Innocent People, on the Screen and in the Theater

It is customary to describe film directors who keep a tight rein on their audience’s responses, who coldly and meticulously manipulate emotion, as sadists. Not necessarily in a bad way; filmmaking is to a large degree an art of control. Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg can all, with some justice, be accused of sadism, a charge that hardly detracts from — indeed, that helps to explain — the way they provide entertainment.
Michael Haneke, an Austrian auteur who has worked for many years in France, has always been more interested in punishing his audience than in entertaining it. [...]

di A. O. Scott, articolo completo (7068 caratteri spazi inclusi) su The New York Times 14 Marzo 2008