The Fault In Our Stars, adapted from the John Green novel of the same name, tells the story of the love between two “cancer kids” who find the lightness in each other despite the bleak reality of illness.

Shailene Woodley stars as Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager who’s been battling metastatic thyroid cancer for most of her life. At a time when Hazel senses her battle could be nearing its end, she falls in love with Gus Waters (Ansel Elgort), who lost his leg to the disease, but is recovering his health. In the bliss of their young love, Hazel and Gus embrace the time they do have together. Their relationship, though it has an overall lightness, is forced to deal with the reality that one of them is likely dying of cancer.

Critics Review 'Fault In Our Stars'

While most critics are loath to find The Fault in Our Stars adaptation – directed by Josh Boone – to be an improvement upon Green’s touching young adult novel, they are largely in agreement that the film is a success. Directed from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (500 Days of Summer), Fault and Our Stars made critics fall in love with the love story that was bound to make them cry.

“Why head out, rather than stay home to reread the book in an armchair? Because you’d miss Laura Dern’s quietly devastating performance as a mother who walks a nightmare every day. Because the sight of Hazel and Gus in a gently lit Amsterdam restaurant, looking achingly young yet desperately pretending to be grown-up and fearless, would touch any heart. Because Woodley’s scratchy little voice carries inside it a world of pain and a wall of toughness." – Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times

"Even though an unhappy ending is a given, Fault is no pity party. Pragmatism was part of the appeal of John Green's bestselling novel on which the film is based. Like its cancer kids, Fault has good and bad moments. What sustains the film through the rockier times are its challenging themes, offering real issues for the young protagonists to wrestle with, rather than whether anyone will be carded trying to buy beer." – Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times

"Although The Fault in Our Stars takes a few genuinely startling turns […] the film doesn’t veer too widely from the parameters of tragic melodrama, a formula that Boone handles with sensitivity and restrained good taste. What’s more, it offers its core young audience the bracing, even exhilarating suggestion that love isn’t just about finding someone worth dying for, but someone who makes life worth living. For that alone, The Fault in Our Stars achieves that rare feat of eliciting as many cheers as tears." – Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

“Though it is a tragic love story, it is also a perfect and irresistible fantasy. Hazel and Gus possess an absolute moral authority, an ability to assert the truth of their experience that few can share and many might covet. They know the meaning of their own lives, and try as it might, the movie can’t help but give cancer credit for this state of perfection. There is something disturbing about that, and also, therefore, about the source of some of the tears the movie calls forth. The loudest weeping you hear — including your own — may arise not from grief or admiration, but from envy.” A.O. Scott, The New York Times

The Fault in Our Stars, rated PG-13, is currently in wide release.