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      ‘The Hunger Games’ Is Back. Here’s What You Need to Know.

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      With the prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” now in theaters, here are answers to questions you may have about the franchise.Arriving eight years after the most recent film in the franchise, “The Hunger Games” is back with a new installment: “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” Adapted from a 2020 novel by Suzanne Collins, the author who created the “Hunger Games,” this film serves as a prequel, taking place 64 years before the events of the first film.For those who don’t remember the back story all that well or have never seen the original movies, here’s a refresher on everything you need to know before jumping into this new dystopian adventure.How long has this been in the works?A film adaptation was planned before Collins’s book was finished. In 2017, Lionsgate, the studio behind the original movies, indicated that it was interested in potential spinoffs, and Collins reached out to Francis Lawrence, who directed the previous three films, about an adaptation while she was still writing the prequel novel.Do I have to watch the other movies before watching this one?That’s up for debate. This prequel is self-contained enough that it could make for an entertaining watch even for those who don’t know much about the original story. You wouldn’t feel completely lost, but you might miss out on some Easter eggs. Most of all, the story it tells about its protagonist, Coriolanus Snow, would be less rich an experience.Where can I watch those movies?All four of the “Hunger Games” movies are currently streaming on Peacock.A scene from “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”LionsgateWhat was the original story about?In the dystopian world of Panem, 12 districts live under the rule of the Capitol and its president, the ruthless Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland). As punishment for a rebellion decades ago that ostensibly destroyed District 13, the Capitol hosts the annual Hunger Games, an elaborate, televised battle royale in which a boy and girl from each of the dozen districts are chosen as “tributes” to fight to the death.After her younger sister is selected for the 74th Games, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), a teenager from District 12, the poorest among all districts, volunteers in her place. She allies herself with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), District 12’s male tribute, and becomes enveloped in the world of the Capitol and the depraved spectacle that the games represent.A firebrand in and out of the arena, Katniss, through her participation in the games, becomes a political symbol. Known as the Mockingjay, she is associated with bolstering a simmering revolution, which makes her the primary enemy of President Snow.What is this prequel about?The film, and the book it’s based on, follows the rise of Coriolanus Snow, long before he becomes the president of the Capitol. A young student hoping to restore the faded glory of his family, he takes part in a new mentorship program, designed to help inspire a more exciting 10th Hunger Games, and is tasked with guiding Lucy Gray Baird, the female tribute from District 12.Despite Lucy Gray’s grim chances in the Games, Coriolanus becomes close with her as he commits to helping her survive. But as their relationship threatens to conflict with his own rise to power, he is pulled between good and evil.Did anyone from the original cast return?Perhaps a natural result of the 64-year gap between the events in this prequel and the first film, no actors from the original cast are part of this installment. Lawrence, though, has returned to direct the new film.Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler in the new film.Murray Close/LionsgateSo who stars in this one?Tom Blyth, a relative newcomer best known as the lead of the Epix show “Billy the Kid,” stars in the central role as Coriolanus. He is joined by Rachel Zegler (who starred in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story) as Lucy Gray Baird.The supporting cast features major names including Peter Dinklage (Dean Highbottom, Coriolanus’s professor), Viola Davis (Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the head gamemaster), Jason Schwartzman (Lucky Flickerman, the host of the Hunger Games), and Hunter Schafer (Tigris, Coriolanus’s cousin).Were those original movies any good?The four previous films, which together grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide, were each received positively by critics and audiences alike. “It speaks to its moment in time,” the Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote of the second film, “Catching Fire.” As a defiant heroine, Katniss, Dargis noted, was emblematic of an overdue shift in mainstream storytelling and “the primary reason that both the book and screen versions soar above the usual adventure-fiction slag heap.” The character also made Jennifer Lawrence a global star and a major box office draw.Are there more films planned after this new one?Fans might not want to get their hopes up. This adaptation covers the entirety of Collins’s prequel book, meaning there is no official source material left for a potential follow-up. And last month, Lawrence said he regretted having split the final book of the original trilogy into two films. So, don’t count on a second ballad any time soon. More

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      What to Know Before Seeing ‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes’

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      With the prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” now in theaters, here are answers to questions you may have about the franchise.Arriving eight years after the most recent film in the franchise, “The Hunger Games” is back with a new installment: “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” Adapted from a 2020 novel by Suzanne Collins, the author who created the “Hunger Games,” this film serves as a prequel, taking place 64 years before the events of the first film.For those who don’t remember the back story all that well or have never seen the original movies, here’s a refresher on everything you need to know before jumping into this new dystopian adventure.How long has this been in the works?A film adaptation was planned before Collins’s book was finished. In 2017, Lionsgate, the studio behind the original movies, indicated that it was interested in potential spinoffs, and Collins reached out to Francis Lawrence, who directed the previous three films, about an adaptation while she was still writing the prequel novel.Do I have to watch the other movies before watching this one?That’s up for debate. This prequel is self-contained enough that it could make for an entertaining watch even for those who don’t know much about the original story. You wouldn’t feel completely lost, but you might miss out on some Easter eggs. Most of all, the story it tells about its protagonist, Coriolanus Snow, would be less rich an experience.Where can I watch those movies?All four of the “Hunger Games” movies are currently streaming on Peacock.A scene from “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”LionsgateWhat was the original story about?In the dystopian world of Panem, 12 districts live under the rule of the Capitol and its president, the ruthless Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland). As punishment for a rebellion decades ago that ostensibly destroyed District 13, the Capitol hosts the annual Hunger Games, an elaborate, televised battle royale in which a boy and girl from each of the dozen districts are chosen as “tributes” to fight to the death.After her younger sister is selected for the 74th Games, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), a teenager from District 12, the poorest among all districts, volunteers in her place. She allies herself with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), District 12’s male tribute, and becomes enveloped in the world of the Capitol and the depraved spectacle that the games represent.A firebrand in and out of the arena, Katniss, through her participation in the games, becomes a political symbol. Known as the Mockingjay, she is associated with bolstering a simmering revolution, which makes her the primary enemy of President Snow.What is this prequel about?The film, and the book it’s based on, follows the rise of Coriolanus Snow, long before he becomes the president of the Capitol. A young student hoping to restore the faded glory of his family, he takes part in a new mentorship program, designed to help inspire a more exciting 10th Hunger Games, and is tasked with guiding Lucy Gray Baird, the female tribute from District 12.Despite Lucy Gray’s grim chances in the Games, Coriolanus becomes close with her as he commits to helping her survive. But as their relationship threatens to conflict with his own rise to power, he is pulled between good and evil.Did anyone from the original cast return?Perhaps a natural result of the 64-year gap between the events in this prequel and the first film, no actors from the original cast are part of this installment. Lawrence, though, has returned to direct the new film.Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler in the new film.Murray Close/LionsgateSo who stars in this one?Tom Blyth, a relative newcomer best known as the lead of the Epix show “Billy the Kid,” stars in the central role as Coriolanus. He is joined by Rachel Zegler (who starred in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story) as Lucy Gray Baird.The supporting cast features major names including Peter Dinklage (Dean Highbottom, Coriolanus’s professor), Viola Davis (Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the head gamemaster), Jason Schwartzman (Lucky Flickerman, the host of the Hunger Games), and Hunter Schafer (Tigris, Coriolanus’s cousin).Were those original movies any good?The four previous films, which together grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide, were each received positively by critics and audiences alike. “It speaks to its moment in time,” the Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote of the second film, “Catching Fire.” As a defiant heroine, Katniss, Dargis noted, was emblematic of an overdue shift in mainstream storytelling and “the primary reason that both the book and screen versions soar above the usual adventure-fiction slag heap.” The character also made Jennifer Lawrence a global star and a major box office draw.Are there more films planned after this new one?Fans might not want to get their hopes up. This adaptation covers the entirety of Collins’s prequel book, meaning there is no official source material left for a potential follow-up. And last month, Lawrence said he regretted having split the final book of the original trilogy into two films. So, don’t count on a second ballad any time soon. More

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      ‘Fallen Leaves’ Review: Love (and Laughs) Among the Ruins

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      In the latest from the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, two lonely people find each other with tenderness, karaoke and deadpan comedy.Modestly scaled and tonally perfect, “Fallen Leaves” opens in a fluorescent hell-on-earth and ends with a vision of something like paradise. In between, there are lonely nights, fleeting joys, ordinary degradations, laborious work, karaoke reveries, many cigarettes and more drinks. A lot of the drinks are downed hurriedly and often furtively by a man, while elsewhere a woman listens to sad songs. Outwardly, these two are leading lives of quiet desperation, though because this is an Aki Kaurismaki movie, their despair comes with great comic timing.A Finnish writer-director best known on the international festival circuit (“Fallen Leaves” won a major award at the 2023 Cannes), Kaurismaki makes movies — precise, austere, plaintive — that resist compartmentalization. Since the early 1980s, he has honed his minimalist visual style and quietly ironic sensibility in more than 20 narrative features that tend to be classed as comedy dramas, tragicomedies or some other hyphenated admixture; the movies are sometimes described as bittersweet, though, for me, their long aftertaste tends to be more sweet than bitter. Yet even these descriptors are too confining.Set in contemporary Helsinki, “Fallen Leaves” opens on the woman who listens to sad songs; it’s a habit that suggests she’s a familiar genre type — she isn’t. A supermarket worker of indistinct age and few smiles, Ansa (Alma Poysti) is impassively restocking some shelves when you first see her. It’s a vivid tableau of everyday banality complete with listless customers, unflattering lighting and the rhythms of alienated labor. And then there is the petty humiliation embodied by the uniformed market guard hawkishly watching Ansa, as if she is a prisoner who, at any second, is about to make a break from it.That’s pretty much what happens when a supermarket manager later fires Ansa for taking some expired food. (She also gives food away.) Kaurismaki doesn’t furiously underscore the cruelty of the manager’s decision; the violence of Ansa’s termination — and that of the pitiless world the manager serves — is as self-evident as the horror in each news report from Ukraine that she regularly listens to. Instead, with a few restrained words and the pacific countenance of a typical Kaurismaki character, Ansa keeps her composure and her eyes on the manager, turning her inexpressiveness into a form of dignified resistance. She makes her break.Shortly thereafter — the movie is only 81 minutes, so things happen quickly here — Ansa meets the drinking man, Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), at a bar. As their friends flirt, amusingly advancing and retreating, Ansa and Holappa trade fugitive looks, their gazes ricocheting around the room. They don’t speak that night, but when they run into each other later, Holappa invites Ansa to the movies. They see Jim Jarmusch’s zombie splatter-fest “The Dead Don’t Die,” watching it without smiles. (Jarmusch and Kaurismaki, twinned virtuosos of deadpan comedy with aesthetic affinities, are friends.) Afterward, Ansa and Holappa agree to meet again, but when he loses her number, each risks losing a chance at happiness.“Fallen Leaves” is consistently funny, but its laughs arrive without fanfare. They slide in calmly, at times obliquely in eccentric details, offbeat juxtapositions, taciturn exchanges, long pauses and amiably barbed insults. When Holappa’s friend Huotari (Janne Hyytiainen) puts some moves on Ansa’s friend Liisa (Nuppu Koivu), she says his voice is “well-preserved for such an elderly man.” (He doesn’t give up.) There’s humor in the image of Holappa, who sleeps in a work dorm, sitting on his simple bed next to a Tom Jones poster, but also pathos; there’s also a glimpse of his possible future when “Mambo Italiano” plays in a bar filled with other men, who, with their faraway looks and sagging faces, seem alone even when together.For a stretch of time, Ansa and Holappa go their separate ways, joined only by the supple editing, some visual similarities and the hyperbolically, at times comically, miserabilist songs that bridge scenes and — like the splashes of color and the numerous film posters scattered throughout the movie — express emotions that the characters don’t or can’t. Their striking reserve, both physically and verbally, can sometimes make them seem defeated, wrung out or just stunned by life. It is very relatable. It is also critical to Kaurismaki’s technique, because by withholding emotion onscreen, he isn’t telling you how to feel but instead giving you space to discover and perhaps fall for these characters on your own.The separation of lovers is also a classic convention in romantic fiction, one that turns longing and foreplay into narrative and sometimes suspense. (Will they, or won’t they?) There’s not much doubt that Ansa and Holappa will again find each other in “Fallen Leaves” (though your heart may skip a beat when they stand in front of a poster for the crushing 1945 romance “Brief Encounter”). There’s pleasure in how Kaurismaki keeps Ansa and Holappa apart and how he teases out their story to quietly build emotional tension. There’s even greater, more lasting pleasure in how — despite the precarity and violence of this world, which can isolate people from one another and their own selves — he tenderly coaxes them together.Fallen LeavesNot rated. In Finnish and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rustin’ Review: A Crucial Civil Rights Activist Gets His Due

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      Colman Domingo carries this biopic of a March on Washington organizer, the first narrative feature from Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company.Every so often an actor so dominates a movie that its success largely hinges on his every word and gesture. That’s the case with Colman Domingo’s galvanic title performance in “Rustin,” which runs like a current through this portrait of the gay civil-rights activist, a close adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Pacifist, ex-con, singer, lutist, socialist — Bayard Rustin had many lives, but he remains best known as the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was Rustin who read the march’s demands from the podium, remaining near King’s side as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.At once a work of reclamation and celebration, “Rustin” seeks to put its subject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he challenged both convention and the law. His was a rich, fascinatingly complex history, filled with big personalities and tremendous stakes, one that here is primarily distilled through the march, which the movie tracks from its rushed conception to its astonishing realization on Aug. 28, 1963, when a quarter million people converged at the Lincoln Memorial. It was the defining public triumph of Rustin’s life.After a little historical scene-setting — via images of stoic protesters surrounded by screaming racists — the director George C. Wolfe, working from a script by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, gets down to business. It’s 1960, and King (Aml Ameen) is exasperated. Several activists have asked King to lead a mass protest against the forthcoming Democratic National Convention. Sighing, King directs his eyes upward as if beseeching a witness from on high and politely declines: “I’m not your man.” A few beats later and his gaze is again directed up, but now at Rustin, who’s towering above King, challenging him.The protest, Rustin explains, will send a message to the party and its nominee, the front-runner John F. Kennedy. Unless the Democrats take a stand against segregation, Rustin says with rising passion and volume, “our people will not show up for them.” His directness and body language nicely dramatize Rustin’s gifts as a strategist, which reach a crescendo when he sits down, so that now it’s him who’s looking up at King. Swayed by Rustin’s forceful argument, King agrees to lead the protest, enraging establishment power brokers like the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Roy Wilkins (a miscast Chris Rock), and the U.S. Representative for Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (a ferocious Jeffrey Wright, taking no prisoners).Five minutes into the movie, and you’re hooked; everything works in this punchy opener. Yet while Domingo, the unfortunately underused Wright and most of the rest of the cast keep charging forward, the movie soon sags under the weight of its central personality and the monumental history it condenses in under two eventful hours. As it straddles the personal and the political, it struggles to do justice to Rustin, whose life story emerges in frustrating piecemeal, along with an anemic love affair, nods at past hurdles, hints of future milestones and appearances by various major players. Carra Patterson shows up as Coretta Scott King; a vivid Michael Potts pops in and out as the labor organizer Cleveland Robinson.Powell and Wilkins succeed in derailing the 1960 protest, causing a rift between King and Rustin. The story picks up three years later shortly before Rustin begins organizing the 1963 march, shifting the movie into high gear with bustling characters, clacking typewriters and ringing phones. At their best, these scenes underscore how the civil rights movement was a titanic communal effort. Yet partly because the movie also wants to be a great-forgotten-man-of-history story, the larger movement fades amid the clamor of what can seem like a one-man show. It suggests, for one, that Rustin originated the idea for the march when, in a 1979 interview, he specifically credited his mentor A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) — whose March on Washington Movement dates to the 1940s — with its creation.The largest problem with the movie is that it’s finally too conventional, formally and politically, to do full justice to the complexities of either the civil-rights movement or Rustin, a socialist whose activism was rooted in his Quakerism and was informed both by his moral beliefs and by economic analysis. When Rustin and other activists on the Left first planned the march, economics was at the fore. “The dynamic that has motivated” Black Americans in their own fight against racism, the plan read, “may now be the catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind the demands for a broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”Whatever its flaws, “Rustin” can’t help but move you with its images of so many people joined in righteous harmony. The optimism of its moment feels very distant from the fractiousness of our own, yet it lifts you, as does Domingo’s fantastically alive turn. From the second that Rustin sweeps into the movie, throwing open his arms to King — and, by extension, welcoming the future they will help make — the actor seizes hold of you. He grabs you with his expressive physicality and then pulls you closer with the urgency, yearning and luminous sincerity that openly plays across his face. It’s such a lucid, persuasive, outwardly effortless performance that you may not even notice he’s carrying this movie almost by himself.RustinRated PG-13 for adults being adults and sometimes smoking. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

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      In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More

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      ‘Best. Christmas. Ever!’ Review: Frenemies Rejoice

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      Heather Graham and Brandy play old friends who have a surprise reunion.Holiday cheer stokes an old source of envy in “Best. Christmas. Ever!,” the latest Netflix holiday film from the director Mary Lambert (“Under the Cherry Moon,” “Pet Sematary”).Heather Graham stars as Charlotte Sanders, whose pleasantly normal suburban life is interrupted every December when her old frenemy Jackie Jennings (Brandy) sends out a diner-menu-size holiday newsletter boasting of her and her family’s latest accomplishments. When a misunderstanding leads the Sanders family to end up on the Jennings family doorstep just before Christmas, Charlotte is forced to spend the holiday in close quarters with her rival — and she uses that time searching for evidence that Jackie’s seemingly perfect life is all a sham.At barely 80 minutes (and ending with a musical number from Brandy), “Best. Christmas. Ever!” resembles a television holiday special more than a feature film, and its plot follows the predictable Christmastime themes of love, acceptance, and being thankful for what you’ve got. Jackie’s sizable McMansion abode, where most of the action takes place, exists in the Home Depot ad version of American suburbia: cozy yet indistinguishable, decked out in holly wreaths and reindeer-shaped lights.Jason Biggs and Matt Cedeño turn in ho-hum performances as Charlotte and Jackie’s husbands, but the focus remains on two women burying the hatchet on old grudges. As one might expect, there’s some Christmas magic involved and, a bit more surprisingly, a hot-air balloon as well.Best. Christmas. Ever!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’ Review: The Feminist Mystique

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      Nicole Newnham’s documentary charts the life and times of the feminist Shere Hite, whose pioneering research on women’s sexuality earned her both fame and notoriety.“The Disappearance of Shere Hite” opens with a 1976 TV interview with Shere Hite about her pioneering study, “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality.” As she talks about the revelations of her research — that women masturbate, and most men don’t know how to please them — the interviewer tells a crew member to stop snickering.Then a cut reveals that what we’re watching is actually a clip being screened within another archival clip, from a 1994 interview, in which Hite reflects on her early media appearances. It’s a nifty opening that drives home Hite’s prominence in culture from the 1970s to the ’90s — and how strange it is that the groundbreaking feminist, who died in 2020, is barely discussed now.Nicole Newnham’s film recoups Hite’s story from the margins of feminist history with both style and substance, taking its cue from its subject. Tall, blonde and immaculately dressed, Hite was a model who appeared in Playboy, and a Columbia University graduate student who railed eloquently against sexism and classism.“The Hite Report,” which compiled questionnaires completed anonymously by thousands of women, was a best seller — but in interview after interview, Hite struggled to be taken seriously. By the time her later studies on male sexuality and women’s love lives were published, she had been labeled a male-basher and a fraud, and went into self-imposed exile in Europe.Newnham weaves deftly between biography and history, damningly situating the backlash to Hite’s taboo-breaking work alongside Anita Bryant’s anti-gay activism and Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. Yet the film also shimmers with hope. Dulcet-voiced readings of Hite’s memoirs by Dakota Johnson (also an executive producer) remind us that it is possible, even in an unyielding world, to think far beyond one’s time.The Disappearance of Shere HiteRated R for brazen talk of women’s sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘JFK: What the Doctors Saw’ Review: A Clinical Take

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      Barbara Shearer’s documentary unpacks the medical opinions of physicians who treated John F. Kennedy in Dallas.Amid a climate of invigorated interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy — stoked by the media capitalizing on the 60th anniversary of his death to reignite familiar debates — Barbara Shearer’s “JFK: What the Doctors Saw” contributes some clarity to the conspiratorial noise by centering on a tiny piece of the puzzle: the professional opinions of the physicians present in the president’s Parkland Memorial Hospital emergency room.While some documentaries feel like rundowns of a Wikipedia page, “What the Doctors Saw” (streaming on Paramount+) more closely resembles a Q. and A. session with Siri. What did the staff observe? An entrance wound on Kennedy’s throat. What does that suggest? A bullet entered from the front. Why is that significant? It contradicts the findings of the Warren Commission.I’m willing to bet that viewers drawn to this documentary will have a basic knowledge of the history. It is smart, then, that this film so clearly defines its scope. Rather than dwell on the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, the documentary dedicates its running time to medical analyses, unpacking the inconsistencies between injuries that doctors observed in Dallas and the autopsy report conducted in Bethesda.This approach also has its drawbacks. The recollections of those who treated Kennedy in Trauma Room 1 at Parkland are remarkably consistent, which is another way of saying that much of this documentary is remarkably repetitive. You will finish the film agreeing that what the doctors saw is crucial. But what it all means for America’s most enduring mystery is no less clear.JFK: What the Doctors SawNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More