Metacritic reviews

With top-notch performances and production design, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a worthy addition to the Hunger Games franchise.

Significantly more intimate and grounded than the previous “Hunger Games” movies (despite being longer than any of them and responsible for seeding all of their lore), “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” is the rare prequel that manages to stand on its own two feet and still feel taller than the other stories it’s ultimately meant to support.

By focusing on the gray between the good and the bad, and with a scale and scope that the other films never quite had, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes might just be the most engrossing film in this series—and almost makes one wish there were more stories here to be told.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is long, which means that it sometimes lags, but its cast and the well-crafted visuals keep it as entertaining as possible.

Actors Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler are brilliant additions to the franchise with equally magnetic takes on their very different characters, but aren’t given enough time to fully flesh them out.

While Lawrence and his producing partners got deserved flak for breaking up Collins' third novel, Mockingjay, into two films, they've learned the wrong lessons here, compressing what should have been either two films or a miniseries into one excessive production.

Davis, Dinklage, Zegler, and the Games thrill, but Snow doesn’t quite summon the substance needed to fulfil this long-haul prequel’s ambitions.

The Hunger Games prequel plunges us back into the futuristic empire of Panem – but fails to live up to the first films of the franchise.

It’s the absence of Lawrence — or at least of any young performer matching her charisma — that’s a key part of the problem here.

This movie finally ties itself into various knots to prefigure the later world of Katniss, but the time to end the Games came long ago.