Hunger and The Visitor
31 March 2009
Hunger
*****
HARSH, harrowing, nightmarish… Steve McQueen’s take on the Troubles is an ordeal, but there’s much to admire. Focusing on the 1981 prison hunger strike, led by IRA volunteer and MP Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), McQueen revisits an era of cold, hard, mutual hatred. Prison officers checking their cars for bombs, brutal and sustained prisoner abuse, dirty protests, casual assassinations, and at the centre of it, Sands. He stands firm, withering from political firebrand to a skeletal jumble of skin and bones. McQueen doesn’t lend the protest unnecessary martyr glamour. He shoots with a blank, surgical and almost documentary-style camera, always pushing into the heart of the horror, refusing to comfort by cutting away. Be warned: Hunger is tough – at times almost unwatchable. It’s also unmissable.
The Visitor
***
SIX FEET UNDER veteran Richard Jenkins received a surprise best actor Oscar nomination for his turn as a depressed professor, experiencing a reawakening at the hands of a couple squatting in his flat. Writer/director Thomas McCarthy nails it when he describes Jenkins’s performance as “so natural you don’t notice the acting”, but the surrounding story is a little too schmaltzy.
Andy Lowe is Digital Editor of totalfilm.com
did you miss?
features
News by…
Topics
Football
People
Julia Buckley
Places
Usa
-
Stoke Newington
Character flat:All bills inc/WiFi,cable15 min2City
£180pw -
Morden Hall Park
Nice Double room in flatshare
£105pcm -
Peckham
F/furnished Doble room in lovely clean house share
£100pw
- gallery:
- all
- staying in
