Hunger: Critic Reviews

For your art-house pleasure and discomfort, here's one of the most talked-about film-festival triumphs of 2008, a disturbingly avid re-creation of the last six weeks in the life and slow, self-imposed wasting of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands.

With calm, deliberate attention -- an approach at once compassionate and dispassionate -- Hunger explores physical extremity and political extremism.

There is an avoidance of affect and a repudiation of the traditional liberal-lenient gestures of dialogue, dramatic consensus and narrative resolution. This is a powerful, provocative piece of work, which leaves a zero-degree burn on the retina.

McQueen has taken the raw materials of filmmaking and committed an act of great art.

A visually ravishing tour of hell and a meditation on freedom that at best is wordlessly profound and at worst interestingly obscure.

I've seen Hunger three times, and with each screening, the spectacle of violence, suffering, and pain becomes more awful and more awe-inspiring.

Young British writer-director Steve McQueen's directorial debut is an emotionally devastating drama that isn't for the squeamish.

It's rigorous, evocative, and, in spite of its grisly imagery, elegant. It's a triumph -- of masochistic literal-mindedness.

In the end, even though I recognized the need to be reminded of Guantanamo and of crimes carried out there, I was awed but not moved by Hunger.

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.

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.

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.

Hunger is daunting and powerful work.

This is strong stuff, a tour of hell on Earth presented in scenes of unbearable tension and pulse-spiking violence. Hunger ends as something else, though, in a vision of transcendence and grace.

A harrowing yet lyrical account of the fatal hunger strike of Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands in the Maze Prison, Northern Ireland, in 1981.

It's a brilliant work of power, maturity and vision that should not be missed.

Powerful, pertinent but not entirely perfect.

Regardless of politics, one must grant McQueen's substantial gifts, which bring to mind Paul Greengrass in another Northern Ireland film, Bloody Sunday.

Relying on images more than words, it's a plea for humanity in times of insanity.

Hunger -- the disturbing, provocative, brilliant feature debut from British director Steve McQueen -- does for modern film what Caravaggio did to Renaissance painting.

A mesmerizing 96 minutes of cinema, one of the truly extraordinary filmmaking debuts of recent years.

Trite, grim and feebly provocative.

Shockingly immediate and philosophically reflective, Hunger is an indelibly moving tribute to what makes us human.

[The] unflinching camera, deliberate pacing and maddeningly long takes (including a 10-minute, single-shot conversation that, while hypnotic, belongs on stage) just amplify the story's innate harshness and test audience endurance levels.