Shame

Directed by Steve McQueen

(NC-17)

**

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This second film from the British director Steve McQueen features “some of the most joyless sex ever put on screen,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. A brave Michael Fassbender stars as a sex-addicted New Yorker burying himself in anonymous hookups, Internet porn, and assignations with prostitutes of both genders, but “the desperation, hostility, and despair” the actor conveys whenever thus engaged make Shame both “difficult to watch and hard to turn away from.” Fassbender hasn’t just bared skin, said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. He takes a character who should be “impossibly repellent” and infuses the anguished figure with enough sympathy to make him unforgettable. Too bad McQueen never reveals why the character is so troubled, or why there’s “a low crackle of incestuous energy” between Fassbender’s loner and the needy sister (Carey Mulligan) who upsets his routines by moving into his apartment uninvited, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. Shame’s “narrative opaqueness” leaves Fassbender in an unenviable spot: laying claim to this year’s title for “most outstanding performance in a mediocre movie.”