What should've been a lingering lamentation suffers an all-consuming transfusion of style over substance. But for a flawless first half, David Bowie’s outstanding performance & Tony Scott’s image-making proof of concept, "The Hunger" remains worthwhile.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 26, 2023

Tony Scott's gorgeously shot erotic vampire drama is so much more than the lesbian sex scene that made it (in)famous. It's a very strong debut for Scott.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 17, 2023

A visual feast starring a trio of gorgeous bloodsuckers, Tony Scott's vampire film is the perfect synthesis of music video sensibilities and pre-AIDS crisis consideration of sex and bisexuality. Sarandon and Deneuve's coupling is infamous for a reason

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 16, 2023

The absence of any labels — the word “vampire” is never used — is a powerful choice to make at a time when stigmatizing conversations about sexuality were dominating the news.

| Oct 27, 2022

I found The Hunger eminently watchable but Tony Scott's aesthetics misplaced, to the detriment of the underlying themes.

| Aug 1, 2022

The film's enduring quality is its ineffable coolness, which feels inextricable from Scott's supposedly lowbrow music video origins.

| Jan 7, 2021

Moody, elegant, and undeniably cool, The Hunger stands alongside the likes of Daughters of Darkness as one of the best artistic cinematic representations of the vampire ever made.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 21, 2020

With style and a proper helping of eroticism and blood, The Hunger gnashes its way by the teeth into that upper echelon, the pantheon of great vampire movies.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 7, 2019

We know that the hunger of the title isn’t just a hunger for blood, it’s a hunger to hold on to life, to love, to all of those moments that make us what we are, in that brief period of our lives that we shine, when we are at our best.

| Feb 19, 2019

A film with legendary cast and photograph. Underestimated at the time, but like any other cult movies, was able to find its audience. [Full review in Spanish]

| Sep 26, 2016

As good a horror film in the most pure, rarefied sense of "horror" that the '80s produced in English.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 24, 2013

Vampire movies were always cool, but it took The Hunger to make them modern.

| Original Score: B | May 14, 2013

Bloody lesbian-vampire story is stylish, but no Twilight.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 8, 2011

The focus of Hunger is emphatically the death of Bobby Sands, specifically, what happens to his body, viewed from a tragic outside and, to an imaginative extent, a determined inside.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Apr 7, 2009

More style than substance, and perhaps simply an excuse to get Denueve and Susan Sarandon, Miriam's post-Bowie love, in bed together.

| Nov 18, 2008

A slick, largely empty visual exercise with vague thematic overtones about a clash between American and European culture.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 18, 2008

In his feature debut, director Tony Scott, brother of Ridley, exhibits the same penchant for eleborate art direction, minimal, humorless dialog and shooting in smoky rooms.

| Nov 18, 2008

Deneuve and Sarandon are something else.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 4, 2007

Visual sensualities will have a feast, but you'll have to read Whitley Strieber's novel if you don't want to emerge with a badly scratched head.

| Jun 24, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 4, 2005