Funny Games U.S. (2007)

Highly Recommended

France/UK/Austria/Germany/Italy
Feature Film
Writer/Director: Michael Haneke
Cinematographer: Darius Khondji
Cast: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, Devon Gearhart

Haneke’s shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 masterpiece, a disturbing cinematic treatise on the relationship between on-screen violence and the viewer, is just (but for its familiarity) as effective as the original; titillating suspense followed by harrowing, painful, and almost impossible to watch scenes of devastation make us feel suitably guilty and stimulate a moral thought process that is atypical of the cinema that it satirises and mimics. Iain.Stott