McQueen could hardly be hipper, yet he remains, to an extent, an old-fashioned aesthete, drawn to extreme behavior in his characters not because of any trials of spirit that they undergo but because he is challenging himself to unleash the wildest material that he, wielding his camera, can then possess and tame.

NEWYORKER: Hot and Bothered

He does this with surprising subtlety, to the extent that he once took legal action against a journalist who said directly that he was an extreme right winger.

BBC: Le Pen: 'Comic book charmer'