The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Essential, and the best of the six by general agreement. Francis Lawrence replaced Gary Ross and steadied everything: the camera sits still, the arena is legible, the Capitol finally looks like a place with an architecture rather than a costume department, and the film is noticeably more confident about being political.

The structure is the reason it works. The first hour is not a Games film at all. It is a victory tour through districts where people are being shot in front of the winners who are there to reassure them, and Katniss and Peeta have to perform contentment in each one while the thing they set off spreads behind them. By the time the Quarter Quell is announced, the arena reads as a solution to a political problem rather than as an annual event.

The clock arena is the best piece of design in the series, a sector-by-sector machine that is cruel on a schedule, and the alliance material gives the film something the first lacked: adults with their own objectives. Jena Malone's Johanna is the most purely enjoyable performance anywhere here, and Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Plutarch as a bureaucrat whose loyalties are unreadable for most of the running time.

It ends mid-breath on a reveal and a cut to black, with nothing resolved, which is the one thing to be prepared for. Have Mockingjay to hand. The gap between this and the first film is the largest quality jump in the series.