But through the occasional mist of tears, the essential phoney-baloniness of this film looked even worse. I am not among them – and it was the same before I became a parent. Now, there may be people who can witness a halfway competent dramatic representation of the death of children from cancer without choking up. (The title may have been inspired by Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer-winning study The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.) Impulsive, entrancing Gus whisks her and her mom off to Amsterdam to meet her hero, and it is a journey that is to bring their relationship to a crisis. Hazel is obsessed with a novel called An Imperial Affliction with a bafflingly abrupt ending, all about a girl dying of cancer, written by a reclusive author called Peter van Houten. 'You two are so adorable,' says Hazel's mother, out loud, without anyone nearby screaming. It is all too clearly Gus's virginity, not his cancer, which is his heartbreaking vulnerability, like Rochester getting to be blind at the beginning and not the end of Jane Eyre. Hazel's own condition in this respect is apparently so self-evident that she never says it out loud.

Despite being such an obvious hottie, Gus is a virgin. Life-affirming Gus likes to have an unlit cigarette in his mouth to show his existential defiance. They are as rich and attractive as teens in a Nancy Meyers movie, with a quirky, smart, back-talking relationship. In the support group that her mom (Laura Dern) forces her to attend, Hazel catches the eye of Gus (Ansel Elgort), a cute boy, whose osteosarcoma condition is also stabilised after the amputation of one leg, although this is mostly concealed under his jeans. Shailene Woodley (from Divergent, and Alexander Payne's The Descendants) plays Hazel, a teenage cancer patient, whose thyroid lesions have metastasised to her lungs her condition, once gravely critical, has stabilised due to experimental drug treatment, but she has to wheel around a portable oxygen tank, a lite-tragical accessory.

It's like being mugged by a professional whose skills in mixed martial arts you can't help but notice and appreciate, even as you are savagely beaten, then dragged upright, bruised and bleeding, and forced to watch as your assailant gives fully 45% of your money to charity. You have to concede the laser-guided accuracy and psychotic vehemence with which it goes for the tear duct. You have to admire the brutal efficiency in this emotional teen movie, based on the colossal young adult bestseller by John Green, which for the most part enforces the silver ring of abstinence with cancer.

The fault in our stars movie review