Amour

Austrian filmmaker and sometime provocateur Michael Haneke has mellowed out a bit over the last few years, as evidenced by 2009’s The White Ribbon, a slow-motion, black-and-white exploration of societal decay. (Even his least disturbing films are kind of disturbing.) His latest film, the mundanely horrifying and extremely powerful Amour, follows suit. Even at his most outrageous (depending on one’s stomach for turpitude), Haneke has allows the small, creeping details to do the disturbing rather than extreme images of violence. In films like Benny’s Video and both versions of Funny Games, horrible things happen. But Haneke instills the viewer with...  read more