The film manages to implicitly convey the overdriven, coked-up confusion that many ’70s period pieces make painfully overt.
If The Hunger Games found its urgency in the horrors of kid-on-kid fatalities, Catching Fire finds it in the collapsing of a societal facade.
Aside from the ethics of 3D, it’s undeniable that Catching Fire will be at an economic disadvantage without it, losing as much as $4 per ticket in some cases.
The film’s form doesn’t distract from the content, and lets the characters speak for themselves.
These days, the X-Men saga seems like an interweaving, incestuous franchise bent on its own redemption.
Is that Katniss Everdeen perched on that craggy peak, or is it Conan the Barbarian?
Fans of Russell’s oddly unpleasant wish-fulfillment fantasy should be pleased by this solid Blu-ray transfer.
Jennifer Lawrence is taking a page from Mo’Nique’s book and playing the campaign game by her own rules.
Let’s try to rid our minds of the deplorable notion that Spielberg and Lee are contending for an award that belongs to Affleck.
Compared to most of the season’s races, Best Actress has remained somewhat open.
Any major-race hopes that Focus Features may have had for the film were basically dashed this week.
Consider Bigelow a virtual lock, tightening up the Best Director field alongside Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee, Ben Affleck, and, perhaps, Tom Hooper or David O. Russell.
What remains in the air is just how many plays the David O. Russell film can pull off.
The pieces brought into play here, of course, are enormously seductive, and it’s not hard to see why so many have been taken in by the film’s wide-eyed charm.
The film invokes the genuine creepiness of 1990s psychological thrillers, but such nostalgia only goes so far.
Will the Academy really go for a star-free, Sendak-esque allegory, whose rugged charms are tied to its loose lack of answers?
These famous fights to the death should, together, sate even the bloodthirstiest film fans.
The Hunger Games succeeds by allowing us to care about who teenagers are hooking up with while also still feeling smart about it.
While Garry Ross’s efforts are quite commendable, there’s little that seems to boast a unique directorial stamp.
The film usually feels like it’s soullessly connecting dots, a far cry from the Before Sunrise-style substance its Yank-meets-Euro chattiness might suggest.