The Hunger Games

Essential, and the right place to begin whatever the chronological order says. Everything the prequels do is built on you already knowing this world and these institutions, and this is the film that establishes both from the ground up, from a child's point of view, without a narrator.

The first forty minutes are the best work in the series. District 12 is shot like a documentary about Appalachian poverty, handheld and desaturated, and the reaping sequence is staged as a civic ceremony that everyone present has attended many times before. Nobody explains the rules. You assemble them from a queue, a blood sample, a glass bowl and the behaviour of adults who have learned how to stand still.

Gary Ross's camera was the main complaint at the time and it is a real one: the handheld shooting in the arena is close to unreadable in places, partly as a style and partly to keep a certificate that allowed teenagers into the cinema for a film about children killing each other. The violence is edited into near-abstraction, which is a defensible choice and an evasive one.

Jennifer Lawrence is what makes it work. Katniss is good at one thing and bad at every public-facing part of what is being asked of her, and the performance keeps her visibly uncomfortable inside the role the Capitol is building for her. The berries at the end are a political act she does not fully understand, and the series spends three more films on the consequences.