I absolutely adored photographer turned director Steven Mcqueen's debut feature Hunger way back when I saw it in 2009. It was the kind of film that not only made you see the world in a new way but showcased the emergence of a bright new talent. So of course I was very much looking forward to his next effort Shame which again starred his Hunger lead actor Michael Fassbender as a sex addict. Dissapointed wouldn't even begin to explain what I felt while watching it. Shame pits Fassbender's sex addict in one deliriously uncomfortable sex scene after another along with slow, unending shots (a given for Mcqueen) yet it all doesn't add up in the end. What we get with Shame is a shallow exercise in style, done with no depth or sense of intimacy. Michael Fassbender is great as the main character but I found Mcqueen was concentrating more on style and less on the character himself. There's a great movie hidden somewhere here but I couldn't find it, even if some scenes did work and the actors got the best they could out of the material. I found it to be an unimportant and self-congratulatory film, the opposite of what Hunger was.