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You’ve Seen This One Before

The Colleen Hoover adaptation It Ends With Us plays like an overfamiliar Lifetime movie with a lot more gloss and only slightly more grit.

Any profundity in It Ends With Us, the first film adaptation of one of Colleen Hoover’s massively best-selling novels in which “everyone harbors relentless angst and has uniformly excellent sex,” pretty much taps out at the three main characters’ names. As an adult (Lively), she’s a florist in Boston with an overbearing mother she keeps at arm’s length and a meet-cute romance with world-class neurosurgeon Ryle (Justin Baldoni, who also directed and produced the film and is embroiled in some kind of tension with the cast; they’ve unfollowed him on social media and at premieres have ignored questions about working with him). That’s because she has her own baggage thanks to a physically violent father, from whom teenage Lily (Isabela Ferrer) hid her first love, an unhoused young man named Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), whose mother kicked him out when he objected to her brutish boyfriend.

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