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

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 24, 2025

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.

| Apr 21, 2025

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

| Mar 20, 2025

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

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 7, 2025

The theme serves as a reminder to domestic abuse victims that there is a way out. But it's questionable whether actor/director/producer Justin Baldoni will helm Colleen Hoover's sequel, "It Starts With Us," which his Wayfarer Films has also optioned.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 29, 2024

The film is a tonal mess, mostly presented as a romantic comedy, although it’s really almost entirely about domestic violence

| Dec 12, 2024

It’s rom-com meets trauma porn, deafeningly emotive in a way that for some will be too much and for others precisely what they are looking for.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 10, 2024

Whatever your issues with the source material, Hoover at least tried to dig into the generational cycle of abuse. Baldoni wants to couch all that in rom-com trappings, diluting the impact and ending up with something more mawkish than moving.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 20, 2024

…the violence done by men to women is such an omnipresent element of today’s daily news cycle that it usually goes uncommented on; IEWU puts these elements front and centre, and that fresh, fearless content seems to be what audiences want to see in droves

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2024

Rich in character and incident, but tonal inconsistencies and some narrative fudging blunt its overall impact.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 9, 2024

The film appears well-intentioned, but it’s inability to keep its focus on Lily, to center her journey absent the will-they-won’t-they rom-com elements, and to present the film with a coding of danger, makes the experience a vapid one ... .

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 8, 2024

It Ends with Us has an important message about domestic violence that it wants to get across, but sadly it ends up getting clumsily handled in a story that's buried under a pile of cliches & extreme coincidences.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 4, 2024

Weaknesses aside, there is a good movie within the faltering framework. Some scenes have believable strengths because Baldoni is a superb director. Even with a cluttered screenplay, he knows how to tell a story that holds your interest as well as it does.

| Oct 10, 2024

Based on the Colleen Hoover bestseller, Blake Lively’s ‘It Ends With Us’ is a tale of love, grief, abuse and rage that’s oddly disengaging

| Oct 4, 2024

It Ends with Us is a mess, but a fairly watchable one.

| Sep 26, 2024

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.

| Sep 17, 2024

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2024

The film’s theme of how abuse occurs in generational cycles is noteworthy as we see Lily’s stalwart goal of breaking that cycle--excellent messages about the topic of physical abuse and self-worth.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 8, 2024

The plot... along with the co-mingled romantic comedy tropes, [date] and [cheapen] the film drastically, despite the care it brings to its more sensitive elements.

| Sep 7, 2024

It’s an unapologetic melodrama through and through, fully aware that we do still go to the movies to watch impossibly gorgeous people existing well behind their means living ordinary lives with relatable problems.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Sep 5, 2024