Steve McQueen tells IndieWire about his Apple TV+ historical epic 'Blitz,' starring Saoirse Ronan and in theaters (briefly) this November.

In my part of the world, war hasn’t occurred for quite a while, so most of the time how we get our information about war is through the media,” writer-director Steve McQueen said at the 62nd New York Film Festival,

Blitz is what you get when you combine Oscar–winning writer/director Steve McQueen ( Shame, 12 Years A Slave ), the works of Charles Dickens, and the third act of Atonement. And while each of these parts may sound promising by themselves, the final combination proves frustratingly uneven.

NYFF: Saoirse Ronan stands out from a surprisingly conventional World War II movie that can struggle to accommodate its director's singular vision.

The reality of World War Two is brought chillingly near in Blitz, also written by McQueen and inspired by his own time as a war artist in Iraq in 2004, through both its narrative and hugely evocative production design.

A more mainstream offering than we might expect from Steve McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave), Blitz pinpoints intimate tales of Londoners during the bombings of World War Two, occasionally pulling back (literally,

What may take you by surprise, if you’re a McQueen fan, is what a shockingly conventional and middle-of-the-road ersatz-Hollywood movie it is. Taken on its own terms, "Blitz" is well done, yet it could almost be a middlebrow Barry Levinson Oscar-bait movie from 1992.

There’s no such thing as a typical Steve McQueen movie. Ever since he started making features with his 2008 Irish hunger-strike drama Hunger, the artist and filmmaker’s work for the screen has demonstrated an intriguing restlessness,