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There is no attempt to set Sands up as a great martyr, no Jesus pose or sentimental music to manipulate emotions. Hunger is interested in none of this. Instead, [McQueen] lets the bodies that sacrificed themselves tell the story they created.
It's a strength of this carefully composed, almost obsessively controlled picture that it has no interest in the conventional biographical focus on a subject.
April 17, 2009
Stop Smiling
McQueen thus succeeds in manufacturing a palpable intensity (some of it very difficult to watch), but retreats into individual subjectivity when it might do better to open out into the larger political arena.
Mr. Sands's story loosely serves as a framework that joins together a series of filmic gallery installations that graphically explore the fragility of the human body.
Hunger is not about the rights and wrongs of the British in Northern Ireland, but about inhumane prison conditions, the steeled determination of IRA members like Bobby Sands, and a rock and a hard place.
Hunger -- the disturbing, provocative, brilliant feature debut from British director Steve McQueen -- does for modern film what Caravaggio did to Renaissance painting.
April 10, 2009
2UE That Movie Show
In the desolate surrounds of a prison environment that affronts humanity McQueen finds the redemptive struggles, and unrelenting spirit in the feces smeared walls of a British prison.
The stylistic palette of McQueen's picture, and its grasp of cinematic vocabulary, elevate the film to a purely visceral realm, so that it seems to bypass your eyes and ears and go straight for your nerve endings.
Midway through the movie there's an epic 24-minute scene...in the claustrophobic cell block the protesters have already internalized their cause so deeply that the world of words seems distant and inconsequential.