• The Hate U Give

    In the last few years, Fox 2000 Pictures has developed a line in sturdy, engaging, young-adult adaptations that play with teen melodrama and “issue” storytelling. And The Hate U Give is the best yet. The Fault in Our Stars was the Ur-text, then Paper Towns, last year’s underrated Love, Simon and now The Hate U Give, from Angie Thomas’ 2017 novel. The film reminded me intensely of Love, Simon, with its arc of a teenager settling into a stable identity and owning their own experiences, and its emphatic exploration of a young person struggling with how to speak their own truth.…

  • The Darkest Minds

    A dwindling genre still pushed by naturally rise-averse studios, the young-adult dystopic takes the us-versus-the-world siege mentality of the average teenager and kits it out with hyperbolic, now-predictable apocalyptic flourishes. A mysterious virus; economic breakdown; savage totalitarianism; stirrings of revolution. Adapted from the first novel of Alexandra Bracken’s YA trilogy with a screenplay from Chad Hodge and direction by Kung Fu Panda’s Jennifer Yuh Nelson, The Darkest Minds pits adults against kids with a savageness that’s almost comic. Youngsters either drop dead, get hunted by psycho bounty hunters, or find themselves herded into concentration camps to scrub boots for sociopaths in balaclavas. Even…