The Long Walk

★★★½

MA. 107 minutes

Hollywood in the 21st century has given us countless young-adult dystopias, but I can’t recall seeing a bleaker example of the genre than The Long Walk , directed by Francis Lawrence, also responsible for the later Hunger Games films.

This is meant as a compliment. Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner ( Strange Darling ) have gone back to one of the founding examples of the genre, an early novel by Stephen King, published under a pen name in 1979 but written more than a decade earlier, when the author was a student fearful of being called up to fight in the Vietnam War.

That anxiety underlies the simple premise of the story, set in an alternate America even more troubled than the real one: 50 youths sign on to take part in a partly televised co

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