Film Review – Turtles All the Way Down

There was a short amount of time when Hollywood was extremely interested in making movies based on novels by author John Green. 2014’s “The Fault in Our Stars” and 2015’s “Paper Towns” attempted to charm young audiences with depictions of hard love and tough feelings, and box office was booming, promising more to come. Other projects came and went, but “Turtles All the Way Down” plays like a focused attempt to reclaim momentum with Green’s audience, with screenwriters Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker working to bring the 2017 book to the screen with emphasis on teen concerns and messy psychological issues. It’s a particularly itchy story to tell, dealing with the suffocating ways of obsessive-compulsive disorder and personal loss, and there’s a lot of ground to cover in just under two hours. Director Hannah Marks (“Don’t Make Me Go”) can’t get her arms completely around the material, especially in the final act, but she crafts an engaging study of relationships and fears, giving “Turtles All the Way Down” some sense of emotional urgency along the way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com