NYFF. Hunger.

"For all its grimy aesthetic beauty and stylishly horrifying images of bodily abuse and decay, the most powerful impression made by Hunger is a stationary 20-minute single-take conversation between imprisoned IRA leader Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham) seated at a table in London's infamous Maze prison in 1981," writes Nick Schager. "A doomed man's final meeting with religious counsel is a scene seen countless times over, yet video-artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen turns his variation into a tour-de-force of controlled dramatics, his camera's rigid medium-shot gaze so intense that one can soon feel the propulsive movement of their back-and-forth verbal volleys, which bluntly lay out their differing views on Sands' plan to stage a suicidal hunger strike."

"McQueen's fundamental concern remains the body, and as Sands (and Fassbender) gradually wastes away, the film becomes both more concrete and more abstract." Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "Sands's self-sacrifice is at once elemental and symbolic, his body a weapon of subversion that is substantial even as it disappears into nothing."

"The film cannot uphold the radical formal structure of its first half, and this seems ultimately a fitting end to a work that chooses a most controversial event for its subject, but refuses to engage with this historical tragedy beyond using it as a vehicle for apolitical philosophizing," argues Caroline McKenzie in Reverse Shot.

The L Magazine's Mark Asch: "Movies that work to accumulate meaning need time and clarity, but even for its asceticism Hunger is essentially kinda flighty - a feast-or-famine moviegoing experience."

"While the situation is well documented and the film's conclusion inevitable, the intimate defiance portrayed here is just as shocking as the grotesque and gut-churning, but hardly gratuitous, violence," writes Nick Plowman.

"McQueen's film is a nuanced masterpiece that never flaunts its artistry, but uses it humbly to serve the all-important story," writes Lauren Wissot in Slant.

Nicholas Rapold talks with McQueen for the New York Sun.

Online viewing tips. Filmcatcher interviews McQueen and IFC has video from the press conference.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update, 10/8: Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video from the press conference.

Update, 10/9: "It is known simply as The Scene," writes Kevin Maher in the London Times. "The scene in the film, to be screened at The Times BFI London Film Festival, is set in the Maze prison meeting room, in 1981, just hours before the 66-day fast that would ultimately kill Sands (Fassbender wastes away on camera, harrowingly, for the final third of the movie), but it bristles with a modern intensity that speaks of contemporary geopolitics and a simple need for human understanding. Mostly, however, it is a masterclass in screen acting from two very different performers." Maher talks with Fassbender and Cunningham.

Updates, 10/10: "Unfortunately, the third section refuses to follow up on the larger consequences of the strike and returns to the former taciturn style in tracing Sands's slow death by self-imposed starvation, though this time incorporating symbol-heavy memory sequences," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for 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."

"The simplifications here are that of a bad music video, or A Clockwork Orange," writes David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook: "where Steve McQueen (if only Steve McQueen!) means to attack the dehumanization of a police/prison state, in which both sides are reduced to identical, equally anonymous existences as soldiers and sufferers, his perfectly-ordered choreography goes beyond an evocation of robotic life to making the director himself the tyrant and oppressor in love with his own stupid reductions."

Update, 10/12: Sean O'Hagan has a longish profile of McQueen in the Observer.

Update, 10/14: "McQueen goes beyond historical inquiry and humanist drama to evoke deeper mysteries of the body and soul," writes Nelson Kim at Hammer to Nail. "Hunger is a stunning debut."

Updates, 10/19: "Both Freddie Toal and his close friend, Sean McGerrigan, were in the Maze prison at the same time as Bobby Sands," writes Sean O'Hagan in the Observer. "Having seen the film, I wanted to hear their story. We arranged to meet in a community centre near the Roman Catholic cathedral in Armagh, the town that we all grew up in and where, to varying degrees, we were politicised by the early years of the Troubles."

"Hunger is a flashy PowerPoint presentation given by a student who didn't do his homework," argues Pacze Moj. "The class should walk out and read Sands's Writings from Prison, instead."

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2008 2:28 PM