The Long Walk (2025)

The review presents the film as a harrowing mirror to reality and a passion play about class solidarity. It singles out the script’s empathy for all characters and the radical defiance found in the central friendship.

The critic calls it a searing yet thoughtful adaptation of Stephen King’s first novel that twists the American Dream into something macabre. It features marvellous performances, especially from Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, as an often agonising horror directed with expertise in dystopian survival tales.

The critic describes it as an uncompromising, unrelentingly bleak and utterly brutal Stephen King adaptation that is one of the most powerful in recent years. It features a poignant emotional heart that powers the narrative through its grim trek.

The critic finds Francis Lawrence’s adaptation bleak and bruising yet emotionally affecting overall. He singles out the warm friendship between the two leads and the heartfelt family relationships for particular praise.

The review calls the adaptation a chummy, harrowing Stephen King B-movie that respectably plods through its hellish metaphor. It singles out the sublime moments of connection and solidarity among the boys amid the violence.

The critic praises Lawrence and the screenwriter for delivering the source material’s dark-hearted vision without any saccharine hope. He highlights the film’s unflinching totalitarian nightmare and the lead performances.

The methodical premise is difficult to dramatize, but Lawrence and the cast maintain its pace through focus on the budding friendship between sensitive Ray Garraty and optimistic Peter McVries amid the brutal contest. The tension builds from the growing exhaustion and inevitable violence, though some backstories remain thin and one performance feels miscalibrated.

The critic describes the film as a bleak yet sentimental take on camaraderie under brutality, likening it to a dude version of The Hunger Games. He praises David Jonsson’s standout performance as the character who insists on solidarity.

The critic presents it as a brutal Stephen King adaptation charting a Hunger Games-style walking contest to the death in a totalitarian America, with strong performances from the young cast and Mark Hamill.

Although it doesn’t reach the melodramatic highs for which it aims, director Francis Lawrence’s film is nonetheless a tense and surprising dystopian drama steeped in personal and national ethos, with an excellent cast that leads toward its beating heart via questions of how best to approach the world when everything feels hopeless. It remains intriguing, if not outright riveting, for the vast majority of its runtime despite some open-ended elements.

The critic sees it as a violent Stephen King adaptation about a death march that offers contemporary commentary on a depraved America. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson deliver superb lead performances, but the film lacks originality and is overloaded with cynicism.

The film tackles what it means for young people to volunteer for organized barbarism out of desperate need, as well as the consumption of their destruction as entertainment, with a strong ensemble showcasing the dehumanizing torture they endure. Lawrence's sparing style locates the fable in an unspecified future, but the message remains muddled, at once hopeful and despairing.

The critic finds this Stephen King adaptation fundamentally limited by its anti-cinematic premise of an endurance trek, despite some strong performances. It is compared unfavourably to The Hunger Games as a low-budget version that quickly runs out of ideas.

The critic finds the Stephen King adaptation gruelling and grimly violent in its depiction of a deadly dystopian contest, with the camera unflinchingly capturing the physical and psychological toll on the teenage participants. Praise is given to the bold changes by the screenwriter that preserve the source's bleakness while highlighting moments of camaraderie, defiance and a touching friendship between the leads.

The critic praises the adaptation as a quietly radical take on the novel, set in an economically wrecked America and stripped back visually compared to The Hunger Games. It highlights the defiant humanity in the friendships formed amid the lethal contest.

The review describes the film as a gruelling dystopian thriller that mixes The Hunger Games with Squid Game but is hampered by King’s philosophising. Strong acting conveys the physical toll of the march effectively.

The critic praises the film's focus on the walkers' lives and emotions, calling it tense, moving, and complex. It stands out as one of the best Stephen King adaptations and horror movies of the year thanks to its exceptional cast and layered character development.

The critic hails it as an emotionally obliterating all-time great Stephen King adaptation and one of the best films of 2025. She praises the focus on the boys' relationships and performances, especially Hoffman and Jonsson, for delivering raw vulnerability and devastating emotional impact without flinching from the brutality.

The critic calls it a bleak, unflinching, and unexpectedly moving adaptation of Stephen King's early novel, one of the strongest yet. She singles out the central performances of Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson for grounding the grim premise with humanity and tenderness amid the physical and psychological torment.

The critic views the film as a gut-wrenching Vietnam War allegory that updates Stephen King’s story to highlight ongoing American economic and systemic violence against its youth. They praise the direction for making the grueling march feel viscerally miserable and thematically resonant but fault its narrow focus on American victims while ignoring the war’s impact on Vietnam.

The adaptation is very good overall, with a stripped-down focus on young men confronting mortality through camaraderie and friendship. It praises the strong ensemble performances, particularly David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman, while noting some tonal issues and broad villain characterization prevent it from being great.