ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

alexanderlavin This is for me the most challenging of all the Haneke films, even more so than the similarly-structured Code Unknown.After a few viewings, though, I get the impression that most of the film is spent observing the processes by which human beings (our work, home life, and beliefs) are rendered commodities that serve the juggernaut of Western Capitalism (Haneke implicitly gives us permission to assign society itself a characterization, since all of his films feature an oppressive social milieu that itself acts as a character).Some characters become commodities successfully, but lose some of their identities in doing so. Other characters cannot be capitalized upon, fail as commodities, and are thusly rejected by the juggernaut or voluntarily remove themselves from it.And in the end, television processes the whirlwind of senseless violence that ends the narrative proper into a "consumable" (Haneke uses a translation of this word in speaking about how television renders human experience) little nugget of infotainment squeezed between other already-digested "fragment" events. My favorite moment in perhaps any of Haneke's films is the credit sequence, played out over traffic sounds but no music, where a young refugee from Hungary (himself becoming "cargo") rides on the back of a freight truck along a highway into the vortex of Vienna amidst other industrious motorists. The the long, calm shot ends as the truck drives past bright McDonald's and Coca-cola signs, welcoming us into the land of image and consumption.So anyway, I could be totally missing the point of this movie, but based on my familiarity with the Haneke universe, this is how it strikes me.Long Live Cinema

zetes This strikes me as Haneke's least successful film. Still, it's more than worthwhile, and I would still nearly call it great. Several different, seemingly random stories are mixed together. We watch vignettes of varying length. Among them are the stories of a homeless Romanian boy who has illegally crossed into Austria, a lovingly married couple adopting a new foster child, another married couple at odds with each other, an old man starved for attention, and a group of frustrated college students. We are told at the beginning that one of these students will murder three people at a bank, and we immediately realize that at least some of the other people we have met will be at that bank. I'm not sure how I feel about this technique; I'm certainly a bit conflicted. And I'm not 100% sure what I'm supposed to get out of this all. I guess it's always worth being reminded of the unpredictability of life and that at any moment we could disappear from this Earth. Interspersed between the various stories there also appear long clips of the evening news, where various atrocities and tragedies are reported in a manner that desensitizes its audience to them. And the climactic event pops up right alongside them. Which of course reminds us also that these atrocities happen to real people, a fact that's so easily forgotten when watching the 10 o'clock news. Structurally, the film is brilliant. It is similar to what Altman was doing with Nashville. Haneke would improve upon this film with Code Unknown, which stands as my favorite of his films and perhaps as my favorite film of the current decade.

gutmann As I've seen Haneke's movie "Benny's Video" before (with one scene I really cannot recommend to non-hart-hearted people), I was a little bit warned of this director, who really manages to torture his public.You may know his more established movie "Funny Games"; believe me, for a Haneke movie, this is a real Hollywood soap opera!!!The movie seems to start quite calm and there is almost no action in it (which is usually not a good pre-condition for me to cherish a movie); but slightly and subliminal you find yourself confronted with many different curriculum vitae of persons, maybe not like you & me but like many of your elder neighbours and peoples you meet on the streets everyday.I don't want to try to describe, how their life is going, how they've lost their prospects & dreams of their life; but sometime during the movie you might recognize, that one of these persons could be you (maybe in 10 years, after having a job, getting more settled, maybe set up a family etc.) and this is very frightening!To say it shortly: You might get afraid of becoming like them!!!The finish of the movie is very sharp; most of these persons you were "pleased" to get to know during this movie are getting killed by an amok student 2 days before xmas and the only thing I & maybe you could think about that: What a lucky day for them !!!

smakawhat The movie takes place in our current time even though it is based on a Christmas Eve killing that took place in 1933. More of the same from director Haneke, but this had interesting characters and scenes. The adoptive family was quite good in portraying themselves and the pix up stick convo was actualy kind of neat..Rating 6 out of 10.