Film: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes 
Cast: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Hunter Schafer, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Dinklage, Viola Davis, Josh Andrés Rivera, Fionnula Flanagan
Director: Francis Lawrence
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 157 mins

This prequel takes us back 64 years showcasing a young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) before he becomes the tyrannical president of Panem. In this he is a love-struck teen who breaks the rules to save Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) a District 12 Tribute, a member of the Covey, a community of itinerant musicians forcibly assigned to a district by the regime, and now a participant in the 10th annual Hunger Games. But we already know that Snow’s moral compass is wonky and the so-called gentle heart he displays here is not going to be sustainable, given that the Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) we know from four previous films, is the ruthless, evil overlord we’ve already come to hate. This comes as a belated extension of the hit saga, with blood sport, endangered young love, negative character development, and some political commentary fighting for evolutionary space.

Coriolanus, an impoverished student from a high society family, is compelled to mentor a Tribute through the training, promotion, and contest period. The game's rule book empowers viewer sponsorship to determine the amount of survival provisions that can be sent via drones to the mentees. As viewership is waning, Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the overseer of the gladiatorial event has to devise new and torturous ways to imperil the Tributes in order to keep the interest going. The increasingly cruel torments unleashed on the games’ contestants fail to register though.