It Ends With Us

The movie wants to be a form of comfort food, assuring us that everything would be all right if only women embraced their traditional roles as nurturers, mothers, and healers, but it all just tastes stale.

This smart and sensitive movie version will more than satisfy the millions who’ve picked it up and found a bible of sorts for abuse survivors.

Those looking for a genre-redefining cinematic masterpiece or expecting a line-by-line remake will leave the theater disappointed. But those searching for a good enough drama with a few standout performances will get their money’s worth...

I didn't see anything in this film that was of tremendous interest or hadn't been done before and better.

Incredibly, Lively makes it all work. Beyond nailing Lily’s exact shade of auburn hair... she also conveys her luminousness and strength, and reminds you how pleasurable it can be to watch a romantic thriller.

It’s not often a motion picture makes me physically ill.

In many ways [It Ends With Us] feels like Sleeping with the Enemy as remade by Hallmark.

The vacuous character of the Lively-Baldoni warfare speaks to the largely barren state of mainstream filmmaking, dominated by conglomerates, billionaire CEOs and a handful of enormously wealthy performers.

Its gravest sin, however, is that it doesn’t portray a broken cycle of abuse at all.

As distilled, it’s so turnkey, didactic and flat that it deducts from the traumatic real-life issue it seeks to dramatize.