the fault in our stars movie review for parents

At the same time, this quest for artistic closure might seal the deal on the couple's affections, as indeed turns out to be the case during a scene - set during the aforementioned visit to the Anne Frank House - implying that Hazel represents a variant on the much-vaunted diarist herself. If Gus can do one thing for his beloved Hazel, it is to whisk her away to Amsterdam so that she can meet the novelist, Peter Van Houten (a grizzled Willem Dafoe) whom she has admired from afar and quiz him about a favourite book of his that also happens to end teasingly mid-sentence. And Elgort ( pictured above right) manages his character's chivalry with an ease that should propel the 20-year-old New Yorker to tween superstardom. While Hazel gently rebuffs Gus's advances, forever insisting that the two are merely good friends, Gus persists with his mordantly funny courtship: he describes his condition, for starters, as an 'excellent weight-loss strategy', given how 'very heavy' legs actually are.

The landscape here is clearly one of pain, and there is something entirely commendable about the way in which its participants for the most part get on with their lives, their occasional medical setbacks shown mostly via flashback even as the present-day focuses on the burgeoning romance between the charmingly forward Gus and the more cautious Hazel. Completing the adolescent triptych is Gus's great friend Isaac (the winning Nat Wolff, an alumnus of Boone's 2013 film Stuck in Love), who is going blind and spends most of the film sightless, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Wry, sardonic, and determined not to milk her ailment for easy bathos, Hazel finds her self-containment thrown amorously off-guard by the arrival in her life of Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a dashing, witty 18-year-old who has lost part of one leg to cancer. To backtrack, this is the tale of Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley, making her bid for the big time), an indrawn 16-year-old with a conspicuous lack of friends who was diagnosed age 13 with cancer, since which time she wears plastic tubing to help her breathe and carries around a portable oxygen tank as a visual reminder of the baggage - both physiological and psychic - that her illness has brought with it. I was more or less going along with a narrative that sells its lack of sentimentality like a badge of honour - until a scene set at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam of such startling insensitivity and phoniness that all the movie's faults suddenly come crashing down around it.

The fault in our stars movie review for parents