Indie Roundup: ‘Amour’

Michael Haneke knows how to make a feel-bad movie. Over his critically acclaimed career he has created a chilly, detached, and starkly unsentimental body of work that turns Hollywood conventions back on themselves. In “Funny Games,” he famously and rather pointedly made the audience complicit in the movie’s on-screen violence. In the disaster movie “Time of the Wolf,” his protagonist — unlike the star of a standard-issue American blockbuster — not only fails to rise to the challenges presented to her but fails even to hold the center of the movie. By the end of the flick, she’s dispirited and cast to the periphery of the movie’s narrative.