The Hunger Games franchise is blessed with Jennifer Lawrence as its heroically defiant protagonist Katniss Everdeen. No matter how much darker, more drastic and deranged developments get in the world of these Games, Lawrence is a touching, authentic and watchable focus for our sympathetic attention.
David O Russell's multi-Oscar-nominated film is a romcom with a difference, dealing as it does with mental-health issues. Bradley Cooper, more usually found parlaying characters with arrested adolescence, here plays Pat Solitano, a man with a condition for which he hates taking his meds because they make him both physically bloated and mentally foggy
If Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games had somehow left you in any doubt about the magnetic screen presence of Jennifer Lawrence, prepare to surrender your remaining misgivings. Playing outspoken, emotionally damaged young widow Tiffany, Lawrence is a firecracker, a powder keg, a force of nature. Watching her, you feel simultaneously secure and on edge, as though you’re in safe hands and yet as though anything could happen.
Being such a massive phenomenon has made The Hunger Games an easy target to tilt at but the truth is that, staying close to the Suzanne Collins novel, this film adaptation is a lean, smart science fiction thriller that there’s much to like about.
If there's one thing Hollywood hates more than people bootlegging its latest blockbusters on mobile phones, it's letting a lucrative franchise go to waste. Thus, after the initial three X-Men films and 2009's Wolverine spin-off, you are invited to roll up for the prequel, skippered by Brit director Matthew Vaughn, of Layer Cake and Kick-Ass fame.
The timely arrival on DVD of Winter’s Bone as it heads for the Oscars ceremony gives a fresh chance to dwell on the film’s unshowy riches. Jennifer Lawrence plays 17-year-old Ree whose father has disappeared, leaving her to care for an invalid mother and a much younger brother and sister. If she can’t find him, a bail bondsman will repossess the family house in the Missouri backwoods.