Film: It Ends With Us   
Cast: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj, Amy Morton, Isabela Ferrer, Alex Neustaedter
Director: Justin Baldoni
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 131 min

This adaptation of the popular Colleen Hoover novel, Produced by and starring Blake Lively, directed by and co-starring Justin Baldoni, is fairly rooted in the source material. The opening sequence has Lily Bloom ( Blake Lively), walking out of her father’s funeral without giving the eulogy her grieving mother counted on her for. Despite misgivings, the young lady had driven from Boston to her hometown in Maine for her father’s funeral. She obviously has a lot of pent-up resentment that she finds impossible to overcome. She just couldn’t list five things she liked about him.

The root of her tension becomes much clearer later when Lily opens her ‘dream’ flower shop and falls for Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), an attractive neurosurgeon, who also happens to be brother to her new assistant Alyssa (Jenny Slate). The director’s attempt to initially withhold certain crucial details of the story and bring it out much later in order to heighten the drama, holds him in good stead. What starts out as a straightforward cliched romance, veers off into triangular conflict and eventually shows itself to be a film about ending the cycle of domestic abuse.