HUNGER (Steve McQueen) Rating: NNNNN
Winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes and the Discovery Award at Toronto, Steve McQueen’s astonishing debut feature offers an impressionistic look at Bobby Sands’s 1981 hunger strike. It’s a devastating, defiantly non-partisan film sure to piss off a goodly segment of its audience with its refusal to stake out a position on the Troubles.
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The absence of moral judgment is one of the most thrilling things about this film. That and the bravura central sequence in which Sands (a terrific Michael Fassbender) debates the value of suicidal resistance with a priest (Liam Cunningham) bent on talking him out of it. Not easily experienced, not easily forgotten.
