Written and directed by Drew Pearce (2018)
Starring Jodie Foster, Sofia Boutella, Sterling K. Brown, and Dave Bautista
Running time 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA rating: R

by Deborah Krieger

Hotel Artemis would be a perfect double bill with a film like Snowpiercer. They’re both small-budget independent dystopian action films with impressively star-filled casts, wholly devoted to playing into their genres and undergirded with a sense of class consciousness. Snowpiercer is much more literal in its condemnation of economic oppression, where the surviving world’s poor are left to languish in filthy conditions at the back of the perpetually-moving train, their children stolen by the obscenely wealthy to make their lifestyles aboard the train possible. Hotel Artemis’ address of class inequality is a little more buried beneath the surface; or, rather, its decision to place the corporation controlling Los Angeles’s water supply in the role of the villain, rather than the individuals on the train in Snowpiercer, comes across as more subtle.