The Hunger Games

Directed by Gary Ross

(PG-13)

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This highly anticipated adaptation is “a far more serious movie than the marketing and mainstream mania have led us to believe,” said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. As in the first book of Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster series, young Katniss Everdeen is a resident of a grim future and has volunteered to replace her sister as a contestant in a battle to the death that is televised to entertain the impoverished masses. But the film is “better and scarier than its source book” because it “aims an angry eye” at “our bloodthirsty, watch-anything-and-cheer culture.” Jennifer Lawrence, who earned an Oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone, “is no less fierce and purposeful” here, said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. She has two potential love interests to juggle, including her partner in the Hunger Games (Josh Hutcherson). But the movie’s core “puts us on the ground, running,” and Lawrence makes a more-than-credible hunter. The film’s greatest flaw is that it follows the book too diligently, said Justin Chang in Variety. Once the games begin, it “feels content to realize someone else’s vision rather than its own.”