Happy End (2017)

With his trademark extreme wide shots and long muted scenes, Michael Haneke again turns his audience into sociopathic voyeurs as he coldly picks apart a French bourgeois family in the same way a bird of prey might annihilate the carcass of a sparrow, but the dread and anxiety you experience while watching this film probably stems more from your expectations from watching Haneke's other films than from anything going on in this less involving of the director's works.

★★★☆☆

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Code Unknown (Code Inconnu) (2000)

The miserable events of Babel, another everything-is-connected drama, were also sparked by a child's actions; here, in Michael Haneke's least grim but still dismaying film, the child's act is reprehensible, a truly callous moment that sparks not moribund events like in Babel, but human, compelling events and by movie's end, it is pretty clear the code referred to in the title is society's broken moral code and that the movie's loosely connected stories are commenting on the tendency of people to hide their "real faces" or mute their true feelings to rascist taunts overheard on a train, to the plight of refugees reported in the news, or to the bullish behaviour of the powerful.

★★★★☆

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Funny Games (2007)

Michael Haneke displays his penchant for themes grim beyond belief with this rivetting story of torture for kicks, with the main antagonist, one of a pair of odd young men terrorizing a family, breaking the fourth wall to torture viewers with fleeting glimpses of American movie hope.

★★★★☆

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The White Ribbon (2009)

In this, another grim Michael Haneke movie, German village folk are besieged by strange, er, accidents, and while it is an intriguing mystery with a fairly satisfying conclusion, it is also quite disturbing and bleak with its main character providing a bleak monotone voiceover narration while the bleak story unhurriedly unfolds in bleak (but often stunning) black and white photography.

★★★☆☆

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