Movie Review: "The Hunger Games: Striking Fire"

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Manohla Dargis

HOLLYWOOD---“Catching Fire” is the follow-up to “The Hunger Games” and the second in what will be four movie adaptations of Suzanne Collins’s fantastically successful book trilogy. (The studio behind the series, Lionsgate, is splitting the final book into two flicks.) It’s largely satisfying as far as screen adventures go, and comes fully loaded with special effects and action scenes, and embellished with the usual brand-name character actors, including the new arrivals Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer. It also has a different director, Francis Lawrence (replacing Gary Ross), who showed he knows his way around the post-apocalypse with the Will Smith vehicle “I Am Legend.”[link]