Funny Games (2008)
Warner Independent Pictures (WIP) | Release Date: March 14, 2008 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
44
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 33 Critic Reviews
Positive:
14
Mixed:
6
Negative:
13
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
A chilly and extraordinarily controlled treatise on film violence, Funny Games punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving it all the sickening torture and mayhem it could possibly desire. Neat trick, that. Read full review
91
Film.comEric D. Snider
Some provocative filmmakers seem intent on irritating or turning off the audience. With Haneke, I get the feeling that once you understand what he’s up to, he’s glad to have you in on the joke. He certainly goes about executing it in a masterful way. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
You can take a page from Wes Craven before he went flat and keep repeating, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie; it's only a movie." But is it? Read full review
88
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
The experience of watching Funny Games, be it the original or this version, is never forgotten, whatever your ultimate impression of the film. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
Funny Games is not entertainment but it is an experience. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time? In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch-the-middle-class-writhe-like-stuck-pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too. Read full review
80
EmpireDamon Wise
A stylish, darkly satirical horror-thriller, raising serious questions about Hollywood’s sanitisation of violence. Read full review
80
Film ThreatRick Kisonak
By and large, reviewers have conceded that the picture is exceptionally gripping and suspenseful while deriding its moral subtext as a crock. The only explanation possible for such fuming pettiness, in my opinion, is the fact that Michael Haneke isn’t one of us. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill Goodykoontz
Brutal, sadistic yet well-made statement about how violence is portrayed in media and our reaction to it. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
Watts, who is one of the film's executive producers, brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianStan Hall
One might reasonably despise Funny Games and consider Haneke an exploitative hypocrite. Still, whether it's the original or the replica, this is a film that is impossible to enjoy and difficult to forget. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
Is Funny Games an unqualified success? No, and for this reason: In order to analyze the devolution of violence into entertainment, the premise obliges the film to superimpose a complicated game atop the genre's simple one – in other words, it makes a game out of the game it condemns. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterStephen Farber
Perhaps the best way to appreciate the picture, its few intellectual pretensions notwithstanding, is as a classy horror film with a particularly nasty edge. It's not exactly entertainment, but it casts a poisonous spell. Read full review
70
Washington PostJohn Anderson
While the movie's star -- and ruler, and ship's captain, and grand poobah -- is Haneke himself, his actors are sublime. Read full review
60
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
Haneke's new Funny Games has a current of bleak humor that comes through more clearly when you're not reading subtitles. It remains a horrifying, implacable mind-fuck, liable to be widely misunderstood and widely despised. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeTy Burr
If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum. Read full review
50
SlateDana Stevens
Many American viewers may take Haneke at his word and walk out midway through this grueling ethics exam of a movie. But much as I may resent the facile polemics of Haneke's shame-the-viewer project, I have to respect the way that he nailed me, trembling, to my seat. Read full review
50
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
The film is merciless in its depiction of death and suffering, Pitt and Corbet are perfectly cast, and Watts, who also served as executive producer, gives a disturbingly raw performance. Read full review
38
USA TodayClaudia Puig
So sadistic and disturbing, Games is easily the toughest movie to sit through since 1994's "Natural Born Killers." Read full review
30
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
A patronizing, self-satisfied piece of work, Funny Games is Michael Haneke's way of chastising us for blindly following the traditional rules of entertainment. Read full review
30
The New YorkerAnthony Lane
The new movie wears an air of old hat. I would absolutely defend Haneke’s right to relaunch his broadside on our voyeuristic vices, but he’s not keeping up with the times; he’s behind them. Read full review
30
VarietyDerek Elley
As shocking and deliberately manipulative as the original movie and -- some may reckon -- even more pointless. Read full review
30
Los Angeles TimesPeter Rainer
In the end, the difference between "Funny Games" and Hollywood schlock horror may only be a matter of breeding. Funny Games is "Saw IV" with a PhD. Read full review
25
New York PostLou Lumenick
The joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for Funny Games, which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as "Hostel," even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
Just because it's a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn't make it any less vile, useless and pointless. Read full review
20
NewsweekDavid Ansen
That this relentless barrage of psychological and physical torture is extremely well made and powerfully performed--Watts hurls herself into her physically demanding role with heroic conviction--somehow makes it worse. Read full review
20
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud. Read full review
20
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should. Read full review
12
Chicago Sun-TimesJim Emerson
Funny Games represents the laborious execution of an abstract notion. The concept is the movie, kind of like Andy Warhol's ''Empire'' (1964), an eight-hour stationary shot of the Empire State Building. You don't have to sit through the whole thing to get the point, unless you really want to. Read full review
0
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged--a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk. Read full review
0
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense. Read full review
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