LONDON - It should come as no surprise that the most recent movie from Steve McQueen defies a ready-made label. Here is a film-maker who won the coveted Turner Prize as an artist before launching a feature career, tackling such subjects as the 1981 Irish hunger striker (Hunger, 2008), sexual addiction (Shame, 2011) and America's repressive past (12 Years A Slave, 2013).

His latest offering, Widows, is ostensibly a heist movie, though it is no Ocean's Eleven (2001). McQueen's film tackles a cash heist executed by four women but it also opens the vault on race, ethnic diversity and politics while exposing a landscape where criminals and legislators have much in common. It opens here on Dec 6.