The Michael Haneke Collection (French, DVD)

Quartet of films by acclaimed Austrian director Michael Haneke. In the 2005 thriller 'Hidden', Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is a successful TV presenter, happily married to Anne (Juliette Binoche). Their idyllic, middle-class life is suddenly derailed when Georges starts receiving tapes through the post, from someone who has been secretly filming him and his family as they get about their daily business. Gradually the tapes become more intimate and more personal, suggesting that the perpetrator is someone who knows Georges well. With the police unable to help, Georges and Anne find their comfortable existance gradually unravelling into paranoia and mistrust. Isabelle Huppert stars in 'The Time of the Wolf' (2003), a tense post-apocalyptic drama set in a world in which society has completely broken down. Anne (Huppert) flees the city with her husband and two children, hoping to find refuge at the family's country home. But when they arrive they realise they have made a terrible mistake, and must embark on a harrowing journey across a land devasted by disaster. Isabelle Huppert also stars in 'The Piano Teacher' (2001) in an award-winning performance as a repressed, masochistic music teacher. Erika Kohut (Huppert) teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory, lives with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot), and privately engages in a series of degrading, masochistic acts. When one of her new students, the handsome Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), tries to seduce her, Erika is first startled, but then agrees to the affair - if it can be conducted on her own terms. What happens next threatens to make her self-destructive impulse even stronger. In 'Code Unknown' (2000), Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) contemptuously throws an empty paper bag into the open hands of Romanian beggar Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu) while walking along a Paris street following a meeting with his brother's girlfriend Anne (Binoche). His impulsive action is witnessed by music teacher Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), who demands that Jean apologise to Maria. The two get caught in a scuffle which results in both Amadou's arrest and Maria's deportation. Haneke's film takes this brief moment and follows the paths of all its main characters over the subsequent weeks, tracing the subtle ways in which different lives intertwine in modern-day Europe.