Chris Routledge has described their collaboration as follows:[1][2]The collaboration with Parker has ranged widely, from the musical Bugsy Malone, through the partly animated Pink Floyd The Wall, to the grim Angel Heart and the strange story of The Road to Welville.
They have been particularly successful with musicals, Hambling's talent for creating the illusion of movement proving useful where musical performances appear in films such as The Commitments, which Lawrence O'Toole called "a great swim for the eyeballs."
Perhaps because of their experience in advertising, Parker's slick and striking images combine well with Hambling's intuitive sense of pace and rhythm, for example in the otherwise problematic Fame, and in the much trailed, but poorly received Evita.In addition to the three BAFTA Awards, Hambling had been nominated for the BAFTA award for three additional films (Fame, Another Country, and Evita).
Six films edited by Hambling were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing (Midnight Express, Fame, Mississippi Burning, The Commitments, In the Name of the Father, and Evita).
According to Alan Parker, by the time Hambling retired in 2003 he was one of just two editors still cutting film manually using a Moviola machine; the other being Michael Kahn, Steven Spielberg's editor.