Shame: Critic Reviews

The biggest surprise in Shame is how distanced, passionless, and merely skin-deep the director's attention is - how little he cares about the subject of his own movie.

How can visual pleasure communicate existential misery? It is a real and interesting challenge, and if "Shame" falls short of meeting it, the seriousness of its effort is hard to deny.

With tremendous performances from Fassbender and Mulligan, and such superb technique from McQueen, this is a horrible inferno.

This is fluid, rigorous, serious cinema; the best kind of adult movie.

Fassbender's portrayal is truly haunting, and when he sobs, dramatically unraveling, it's clear he's imprisoned by his physical urges.

What movies so often relegate to the margins of pornography or sophomoric titillation is radically redefined here, stripped of its erotic charge and depicted as a numbing erasure of life and emotion.

There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of "Shame.'' But never at him.

Was that an angel of hope riding to work on the Lexington Avenue local? Does the Lord really live in this cold, ethereal New York City? And is anyone even interested?

These characters are stripped bare in every sense, reflecting an extreme degree of inner confusion, vulnerability and fear. Betrayed and broken as children, they now have to define and rebuild themselves as adults.

Much of the film is banal or pretentious, or both -- vacuous vignettes about emptiness. Occasionally, though, those vignettes burst into life and burn with consuming fire.

[A] graphic and spontaneous portrait of a spiraling sex addict.

One shot of a shattered Brandon standing in the rain without a clue of where to turn gets more done than any of McQueen's flourishes, frankly. But you can't blame a onetime conceptual artist for trying...

Fassbender, who was, frankly, much sexier and more devilish in "X-Men: First Class," is required to spend much of his time staring with blank intensity into the middle distance.

This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.

There is a good movie to be made about someone like Brandon, especially with someone like Fassbender, a performer of exceptional technical facility and a fascinating sense of reserve. McQueen's isn't quite it.

This one simply recycles art-movie cliches about urban alienation and passionless sex.

McQueen finds the exquisite tension between the brother wanting to disconnect and the sister longing for connection.

Shame is something of a dirty date that leaves you wondering what went wrong.

[Fassbender is] so good as a man completely lost to his baser impulses that it makes "Shame" worth sitting through. Enjoying? That's a relative term. But you'll certainly appreciate it.

It's the study of a man whose soul has been peeled away, like coring an apple. But I wouldn't call it sexy -- or entertaining. What does Brandon learn? What do we learn?

Few filmmakers have plumbed the soul-churning depths of sexual addiction as fearlessly as British director Steve McQueen has in Shame.

A grim and arty drama that more than earns its NC-17 rating.

Rarely has a movie been so sexual without being remotely sexy. Rarely has a guy who might be admired in a sex comedy as a "playa" seemed more pathetic with each fresh conquest.

The wisdom of Shame is that it offers no easy exit for this prison of the mind.