Hey guys, today’s movie review is for It Ends With Us, now playing in theaters. This film stars Blake Lively, who is amazing in this film. It is based off a highly acclaimed, best-selling book, which my mom read and she dragged me to the theater and I had to go watch this with her. Now as somebody like herself who read the book and is now watching this live action adaptation for the first time, she loved it. And as someone like myself, whose first exposure to the story was tonight in the theater, I absolutely love this film. Now this movie has a very similar, if not the exact same, story structure as a Tyler Perry movie. Stay with me, stay with me, please. What I mean by that, let’s kind of follow the story progression here, without spoiling anything. Woman, you know, who in her childhood meets her young love of her life and then they kind of drift apart due to circumstance. Years go by, now she meets a new man who seems suave, basically perfect, rich, handsome, all that kind of good stuff, but he seems to have a dark past and dark secrets start to come out and then re-enter into her life her younger lover from the past. And thus we trampoline into a whole new story. Very Tyler Perry-esque and especially if we do like a one-on-one comparison to his newest film that just came out called Divorce in the Black on Amazon Prime by Megan Good and Corey Harding. However, Tyler Perry can really take some notes here because what this film does so much better is it establishes character growth and development and it shows the importance of nuance. Just to give a brief one-on-one comparison, like I said, Tyler Perry’s latest movie, in that movie Megan Good is the good person, her old boyfriend Benji is the bad person, he’s a good person as well, and her current husband is a bad person, but he’s so blatantly bad, it’s just black and white. They’re good, I’m evil, from the first scene we see him, that’s when his character growth starts and that’s where it ends. In this movie, the bad guy Ryle, Blake Lively’s new guy in her life, his layers are peeled back slowly as the film progresses and we get to see why he is the way that he is and it’s just a masterclass on nuance. This film has so many just really great scenes in it when it comes to interactions between two characters, things that kind of come back in the play, and it just had me smiling from ear to ear at certain times and I hate when I catch myself smiling when I’m watching the movie because I’m like, my dude, you bitch, stop smiling at the damn screen. But it’s really a testament to that being a really good scene and being a really good movie. This movie has a runtime of about two hours and ten minutes, which is typically long, on the long side for a movie like this, but this movie is a perfect example of a movie utilizing its entire runtime to its full advantage. We needed that two hours plus for Blake Lively’s character to go through these stages of her life, to be with those people in her life for that amount of time and for us to have that organic character growth. I’ve always been a big advocate for true theatrically released big budget romance movies, more of them in the theaters. Not rom-coms, they deserve their own respect as well, but more just true romance movies and I’m so glad we got this. It was so refreshing. This movie Trigger Warning does have, does cover the topic of domestic violence, domestic abuse, but this movie, based on the women in my theater tonight who are sniffling, crying, clapping, it seemed to definitely be important and to impact women who have either gone through such horrific things, women who just enjoy this adaptation or people like myself who just watched the story unravel for the first time and have become attached to these characters. So great movie, man. I give it an A-. I did not think I’d be watching a great movie tonight in this, but it is with us as a recommendation for me for sure.