A Matter of Perspective

A Matter of Perspective Steve McQueen's worst film is still a solid WWII drama.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING as a typical Steve McQueen movie. Ever since he started making features with his 2008 Irish-hungerstrike drama, Hunger, the artist’s work for the screen has demonstrated an intriguing restlessness, an unwillingness to be pinned down in terms of subject matter or structure. You can tease out something like a guiding philosophy from the filmmaker’s interest in making intimate and felt stories about vast struggles. But even that’s more a tendency than a unifying quality for a director who went from a chilly portrait of a sex addict in Shame to a devastating depiction of bondage in 12 Years a Slave to the sinewy heist movie Widows, then to Small Axe, a kaleidoscopic anthology series about London’s West Indian community. ent. Occupied City, the documentary he directed last year, is a work of formal vigor with a marathon run time about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Blitz, his latest, is a sentimental journey through London in 1940 that follows a boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) as he escapes a train evacuating children to the countryside and hurries back to the ravaged city to reunite with his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan, giving her all in a film that leans on her supporting character more than is warranted).