The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Inspirational series closes with a fizzle.

In Mockingjay – Part 2, the fourth and final installment of the hitherto superb The Hunger Games series, something slips. The viewer feels disconnected from the characters. Their dialogue sounds contrived and melodramatic. The emotional investment in the fate of Panem seems tempered. When characters flee from life-threatening dangers, they appear to jog rather than sprint.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 / review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Games shift from arena to conference room as heroine juggles public persona with personal quandary

Director Francis Lawrence had his work cut out for him with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, the first of the two-part conclusion to The Hunger Games series. He had to adapt the first (and more subdued) half of the final novel in Suzanne Collins’s trilogy into a film that maintains the viewer’s attention and builds tension without stealing the show from the finale.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, reviewed by Douglas J. Ogurek

Rarely does a movie outshine the book that inspired it. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire blazes as an exception.

Catching Fire, the middle installment in Suzanne Collins’s hugely popular Hunger Games trilogy, divides into two stories that could stand alone. The second and far better half details the Hunger Games’ 75th anniversary “Quarter Quell”. District 12 tributes (i.e., competitors) and winners of the last game, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, square off in a fight-to-the-death match against past victors from the nation of Panem’s other eleven districts. Collins writes about this battle royal with skill, and the film follows suit.