Dear Evan Hansen

Something has been lost in translation from stage to screen because what's there now does not seem strong enough to have won best musical and best score on Broadway. And at 137 minutes, it does go on.

It's the cinema equivalent of rubbing cut onions in the eyes of the audience: film-making that is cynically and artificially engineered to make the audience weep.

The endless emotional frankness of the lyrics - those who seek the ironic distance of Sondheim need look elsewhere - becomes exhausting all too quickly.

The film is aggressively needy.

The film becomes one giant gamble that's quite disastrously failed to pay off.

On all fronts, you wish that Dear Evan Hansen had nothing to do with Evan Hansen.

Delving into the issue of young people's mental health is courageous - but this mawkish adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical simply doesn't work.

Dear Evan Hansen deals with very complicated scenarios in a way that I have very complicated feelings towards. I see what it’s trying to do, and it succeeds in some ways, but it feels dirty in others.

But the story Evan fabricates, even with context, is so shockingly abhorrent, and the film never recovers from that.

I’m not familiar with the source material but I have no idea how it worked on stage… I could not get behind Hansen as a character making the entire film a giant mixed bag