Michel Haneke's most restrained and involving film deals with the relationship between personal and political responsibility. Two great French stars, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, play an upper-middle-class Parisian couple whose seemingly perfect life gradually disintegrates when they begin receiving surveillance videotapes of the exterior of their house. Who could be making these tapes and what could the motive be? As the tapes become increasingly personal and suggest that the person sending them knows the couple and may be a threat to their teen-age son, the husband's defenses against a guilty secret from his childhood crumble and his anger and paranoia are unleashed. Haneke's target is the racism that shapes Western Europe's relationship to African, Asian and Middle Eastern societies. "Terrorize me and my family and you'll regret it," says Auteuil's character to the Algerian man whose future he destroyed when they were both children. While the ugly history of the French in Algeria is the film's direct reference, Haneke's indictment could easily encompass the U.S.'s war in Iraq. (Amy Taubin)

2005 Cannes Film Festival: WINNER Best Director, FIPRESCI Prize, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury

Director: Michael Haneke
Producer: Veit Heiduschka
Cast: Juliette Binoche

French actress Juliette Binoche first earned recognition in 1985 for playing a modernized, teenaged version of the Virgin Mary in Jean-Luc Godard's controversial JE VOUS SALUE, MARIE/HAIL MARY. She gained true international acclaim when she played Tereza in THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING in 1988. Binoche gave a captivating performance in the art-house hit CHOCOLAT, and she most recently appeared with American star Samuel L. Jackson in director John Boorman's political oriented drama IN MY COUNTRY.