The greatest achievement to watch The Hunger Games is that in adapting a phenomenally successful teen novel it have produced something that works as a film, not just as an adaptation of a book. When a series has sold millions of copies, as Suzanne Collins’ trilogy has, the default position is to produce something that will look just as readers imagined, to show what we were all thinking, rather than offer something nobody had considered. The Hunger Games as a novel has been dissected, expanded and retooled into something intelligent, immersive and powerfully current.

The world of Panem, a futuristic America, is established elegantly in about 90 seconds. First we see two men discussing an event called The Hunger Games in front of an audience. Then we cut to District 12, where all is grey and people dress like the cast of a regional stage production of Little House On The Prairie. This is how Panem is divided. There are the haves and the have-nots. The haves live in The Capitol, amid great wealth and power. The have-nots live in a series of impoverished districts, put under oppressive rule after a failed uprising some time in the indefinite past. Each year two of every district’s youngest members are selected to battle to the death in an arena, from which one will emerge victorious for… no real reason. The poor will do as they are told, however senseless, and the rich will keep on keeping on. The echoes of the 99%ers are clear and not unintended. watch The Hunger Games.

This world bleeds with a cruelty from which director Gary Ross never retreats. Even luxury is portrayed as almost oppressive — gluttonous and requiring constant effort. Our heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), is introduced hunting a cute little deer — typically movie shorthand for a complete monster. She has no time for being wistful because she has to survive. Lawrence is perfect as Katniss. There’s very little softness about her, more a melancholy determination that good must be done even if that requires bad things. She stretches many of the tightly anguished muscles built in Winter’s Bone — the District 12 scenes have a similar hard-bitten feel — plus some other more traditionally gym-honed ones.

The violence and cruelty is most explicit in the Hunger Games arena, a vast, synthetic forest where 24 children hunt each other, and the level of brutality is very smartly done. You don’t get a rating suitable for a teenage audience by gutting preteens or decorating the landscape with their blood. So Ross cuts around it. The constantly searching, handheld camerawork used throughout the film comes in most useful during moments of violence, flashing round the action and making you think you’ve seen everything without ever really clocking anything that would upset your appetite.

It’s an old trick but a very effective one. The only clumsy element of these scenes is an intermittent commentary provided by Stanley Tucci and Toby Jones, which fills in incidental story details in a brash way. When it pops up, it kills the momentum.

Arguably more interesting than the cruelty within the arena is that going on outside, which is almost entirely of the film’s invention. Unlike in the book, we see The Capital’s Gamemakers pulling the strings, despatching contestants with casual stage directions. It’s all played with a cold, even hand, chilling in its absolute lack of concern for consequence. It’s these moments that linger after the film has finished because it doesn’t seem quite so very removed from reality. watch The Hunger Games.

As thrilling and smart as it is terrifying. There have been a number of big-gun literary series brought to screen over the past decade. This slays them all.   watch new movies

Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) is just a regular guy of the future: He’s got an assembly-line job building worker robots called “synths”; a charmless apartment in the Colony, a sprawling megacity on the wrong side of the world’s tracks; a best buddy, Harry (Bokeem Woodbine), with whom he can share a couple of laughs, a beer and the daily commute through the Earth’s core to and from the United Federation of Britain, home of the future’s one-percenters; and a smoking-hot wife (Kate Beckinsale) who adores him and makes up for a whole lot of drudgery.watch Total Recall

But he’s still restless and unfulfilled enough to pay a visit to Rekall, a high-tech brain-bending business that styles itself as the antidote to everyday blahs: For a modest fee, Rekall will give you fake memories of whatever you’d like, from a perfect vacation to a thrilling secret life. It sounds like a great deal, but Quaid’s little shot of happiness doesn’t work as advertised: One minute he’s relaxing in a Rekall room, the next minute a pack of storm troopers is shooting up the place, and the minute after that they’re all dead and Quaid is the last man standing. How’d that happen?

The short answer—and the one that doesn’t spoil the plot’s various twists and turns—is that Quaid isn’t quite the everyman he appears: He actually does have a thrilling secret life, one somebody buried under a lifetime’s worth of false memories of stultifying ordinariness. Rekall’s brain-meddling brought some real memories back to the surface, and Quaid needs to dig out the rest ASAP, because whoever he was is on the mother of all hit lists.watch Total Recall

For all the dozens of movies based to one degree or another on Philip K. Dick’s hallucinogenic science-fiction stories, he’s not an easy writer to adapt to the screen: Dick was stronger on hypnotically nutty, paranoid ideas than on plot and character development and much more interested in riffing on trippy “what ifs” than mundane things like narrative resolution.

And that brings us to Total Recall, which owes more to the 1990 movie than it does to Dick (a fact reflected in the screenplay credits) in every respect except the dystopian production design, which while gloriously gritty owes just about everything to Blade Runner, with the exception of the synths, which look an awful lot like slimmed-down Imperial Storm Troopers.watch Total Recall

On the plus side, Farrell is a far better actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger; in the rare moments when he’s not parkouring his way through would-be assassins, he imbues Quaid with a touch of genuine humanity. And there are nice supporting turns by a bleach-blond John Cho, “Breaking Bad”’s Bryan Cranston and U.K. character actor Bill Nighy. Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel, who play the women in Quaid’s lives, nail the physical demands of their parts but fall short on the character front. There’s not much apparent difference between them and there should be: They embody the rift between the man Quaid is and the one he’s been hacked into thinking he is. They even look alike, matching robo-Barbies with killer moves…which, come to think of it, will suit some viewers—the same ones thrilled by the fact that, yes, the three-breasted babe is back—just fine.  watch new movies

As embodied by Andrew Garfield (“The Social Network”), angry, rebellious Peter Parker wonders why, one night when he was little, his parents dropped him off with his Aunt Mae (Sally Field) and Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and disappeared forever. After he finds scientific papers in an old briefcase belonging to his dad (Campbell Scott), Parker diligently tracks down his father’s former colleague, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), at Manhattan’s OsCorp research center, where his savvy Midtown Science High School classmate, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), is leading a guided tour. Invigorated by Parker’s discovery of his father’s formula specifically relating to cross-species limb regeneration, psychologically-pressured Connors injects himself – with monstrous results.    Scripted by James Vanderbilt, Steve Kloves and Alvin Sargent, it’s directed by Marc Webb, whose “500 Days of Summer” was a charming romantic comedy. So it’s not surprising that Webb invigorates the Parker/Stacy relationship with that same kind of awkward wistfulness, adding a palpable sense of mystery and danger, epitomized by “We all have secrets: the ones we keep, and the ones that are kept from us.”

Plus it helps that there’s obvious chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone (“Easy A,” “Crazy, Stupid Love”), who playfully cautions, “Easy there, bug boy.”

John Schwartzman’s spectacular cinematography is amplified by James Horner’s score, while Vic and Andy Armstrong’s second-unit and stunt-work introduces the French sport of parkour, in which athletes run, jump and climb in urban environments, and reinvents the way Spidey zips from building to building.

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Amazing Spider-Man” is an awesome 8, delivering emotional truth along with spectacular visual effects. Be sure to stay for a pivotal, provocative scene after the closing credits.   watch new movies

To watch Safe reveals itself to be a wholly remarkable film. It is brutally violent and features lots of inventive and bloody mayhem. For with just the slightest of alterations in emphasis, with just the smallest of sharply observed touches, writer-director Boaz Yakin has created something extraordinary: a viciously cynical dark fantasy that fashions a new mythos of post-9/11 New York unlike anything we’ve seen, a bleak but all too plausible world of organized crime finding a new footing with law-enforcement attention focused on terrorism… and a place in which the tiny slice of the NYPD left to fend with the Russian mob and the Chinese Triads is just one more gang vying for supremacy.

The ferocious violence aside, it’s depressingly cynical. It’s endurable only if you take it as fantasy. It’s so authentically New York in its presentation — with fight sequences on subway trains and wrong-way car chases up East Side avenues — that its portrait of a city that has descended into another circle of hell might be mistaken for authentic as well. watch Safe.

The utter absence of sentimentality in a story ripe for it only adds to its conviction. Luke Wright (Statham) is an all-around badass who was once some sort of elite agent recruited into the NYPD after 9/11 but is now on the outs with that agency as well. He is in a very bad way as the film opens: he pissed off the Russians something fierce and is enduring a punishment that is ingeniously cruel and original. I’ve barely seen Statham present anything close to human onscreen, and here he’s totally compelling in portraying a man who is suffering under his forced disconnect from everyone around him. One vividly memorable scene sees Luke extend the barest hand of kindness to a stranger because he apparently can’t bear not to, only for the gesture to backfire. It’s downright poignant… and it sets the main action of the story in motion, when Luke comes to the aid of 11-year-old Mei (Catherine Chan), who has become a pawn in the triangular war between the Russians, the Chinese, and the NYPD.

It seems like a recipe for something supremely cheesy: Badass rescues little girl. Safe never becomes that. Partly because Mei is pretty badass herself. As a tool of her uncle, gang boss Han Jiao, for her amazing skill with numbers — very helpful to a criminal who doesn’t want to put any evidence of extortion and money laundering on hard drives — she is a canny operator who ends up being an able partner for Luke as they unravel Han’s plan for the Very Important Number Mei is holding in her head. watch Safe.

Cheese is shunned, too, by the outstanding sweep of the story: it feels like it’s just slightly scatching the surface of a new world we haven’t quite seen before, and so it’s got too much else going on to need to bother with cheap or easy sentiment — indeed, there’s no room for cheap or easy sentiment in this world. With Safe, it feels like all bets are off, and we can never be sure what unexpected turns it might take. One tiny aside early in the film that demonstrates swiftly and surely Luke’s own ambivalence about the violence he wreaks is extraordinary for how it weaves new threads into a tapestry that seemed to have no left room for expansion.  watch new movies