More than its attempts to stir reflection on what it means to live and what it means to die, The Fault In Our Stars left me contemplating film criticism. Like most critics I suspect, I have a process. While I watch, observations collect in one mental pile, possible phrases in another, and eventually, the back of my mind has a checklist of successes and failures. It almost becomes like math: subtract what didn’t work from what did, and if the film’s still in good shape by the end I’ll stamp it with a good letter grade at the bottom of the review. But this is a curious circumstance, since, no matter how many flaws I could detect, and it quickly becomes apparent there is a bounty of them, there was little doubt I felt exactly what the film wanted me to at any given moment. Despite my best intentions to sit impervious to its not so invisible tricks, The Fault In Our Stars won. I choked up. More than once. And if I’m being really honest, the number is above the number of fingers I have on one hand. What director Josh Boone made wasn’t a film; it’s a finely tuned manipulative machine, primed with ruthless efficiency to elicit a powerful response of leaking emotion.

This is the latest of 2014’s young adult adaptations, and the second built as a starring vehicle for the beautiful star of The Secret Life of an American Teenager, Shailene Woodley. Adapted from a book of the same name from acclaimed and impressively internet friendly author John Green, The Fault In Our Stars falls in the well-explored genre of “sick-lit”, where characters confront real life tragedy instead of, as The Gaurdian puts it, “dragons, wizards, and vampire romances.” Woodley plays a sixteen year old girl named Hazel Grace Lancaster, who at an early age was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. It spread to her lungs, and to breathe she’s forced her to carry around a portable oxygen tank like a ball and chain. Although she has warm support by her parents (played by True Blood star Sam Trammell and Laura Dern), her life is fairly contained. Solitary. At the request of her persistently caring mother, the kind we would be lucky have, she puts an end to her seclusion and joins a support group. It’s there the romance we were promised in the trailers sparks, where she bumps into a boy named Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) and the second their eyes meet they’re on a predictable path of love.