(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. “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. It’s here that she hunts game to feed her family and where this startlingly new pioneer - with her bow and arrows, leather jacket and boots, primitive individualism and totally awesome strength of character - was forged. However pastoral, this isn’t the forest primeval but the very edge of free land outside the impoverished zone in which Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and her relatives, friends and the other starved souls labor for Panem, the authoritarian state built on the ruins of North America after a catastrophic war. When “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” opens, its lethally resourceful teenage heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is crouching in a forest, surveying a terrain as pristine as the one once scouted by American Indians.

Free The Hunger Games: Catching Fire