Irish republican Bobby Sands leads the inmates of a Northern Irish prison in a hunger strike.
1967, Newtontownbutler, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, UK
2 June 1961, Dublin, Ireland
14 April 1955, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
1967, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
1958, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
13 October 1925, Grantham, Lincolnshire, England, UK
25 May 1952, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
1954, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
2 April 1977, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany
30 April 1955, Lisburn County, Antrim, Northern Ireland, UK
December 12, 2015
There is no attempt to set Sands up as a great martyr, no Jesus pose or sentimental music to manipulate emotions. Hunger is interested in none of this. Instead, [McQueen] lets the bodies that sacrificed themselves tell the story they created.
April 16, 2009
Hunger is daunting and powerful work.
April 16, 2009
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.
April 17, 2009
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.
April 10, 2009
Hunger -- the disturbing, provocative, brilliant feature debut from British director Steve McQueen -- does for modern film what Caravaggio did to Renaissance painting.
August 02, 2015
McQueen thus succeeds in manufacturing a palpable intensity (some of it very difficult to watch), but retreats into individual subjectivity when it might do better to open out into the larger political arena.
June 01, 2015
In such extreme circumstances, the human body may be the last desperate frontier of protest. Hunger makes this all too clear.
October 07, 2015
Mr. Sands's story loosely serves as a framework that joins together a series of filmic gallery installations that graphically explore the fragility of the human body.
November 02, 2015
The stylistic palette of McQueen's picture, and its grasp of cinematic vocabulary, elevate the film to a purely visceral realm, so that it seems to bypass your eyes and ears and go straight for your nerve endings.
January 21, 2013
In the desolate surrounds of a prison environment that affronts humanity McQueen finds the redemptive struggles, and unrelenting spirit in the feces smeared walls of a British prison.
April 17, 2009
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.
April 10, 2009
Relying on images more than words, it's a plea for humanity in times of insanity.
