Putting aside my aversion to any and all depictions of fecal matter in any form of art (including movies), Steve McQueen‘s Hunger has to be one of the most impressively composed endless-penal-suffering poems ever captured on film. To crib from my Toronto Film Festival response, is “top-notch — a frank and unsparing chronicle of political torture of IRA combatants by the British, and particularly the plight of Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who died from a hunger strike in 1981 at age 27.”
It’s been playing at Manhattan’s IFC Center for almost a week now. If you can get past the repulsion (or even if you can;t), you’ll find it unforgettable.
