Critics aren’t laughing at Funny Games

A new film from Austrian director Michael Haneke has opened in the US to near universal outrage from the critics. Their reaction is hardly surprising, because Funny Games is intended to rub American noses in their complicity in cinematic violence.

The thought that Haneke, 66, is evidently having some sort of post-modernist European joke at their expense - a joke which they don't quite get - has driven some reviewers to fury. It doesn't help that they know that Haneke is one of Europe's most respected film-makers, best known for his 2005 Parisian thriller Cache or Hidden, and recently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"Torture porn for the art-house crowd," sneered one critic. The reviewer for the New York Times chastised Haneke for subjecting

viewers "to a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality - Funny Games tries to insulate itself from its own awfulness in the fine cloth of self-consciousness".

Even Naomi Watts, the film's star and one of its producers, was attacked. "Why such a talented and versatile actress would be drawn to such deplorable material is baffling."

What is it that American critics have found so distasteful?

Funny Games is a shot-for-shot, scene-for-scene remake of the director's own 1997 German-language film of the same title. The new version is in English and features Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as an idyllic, well-to-do American couple complete with a young son, golden retriever and waterfront holiday home.

Their vacation comes to an abrupt and violent end when two preppy young men, played by Michael Pitt