I’ll confess: I walked into Vanessa Caswill’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel fully braced for manipulation, the Hallmark channel in wide-release clothing, engineered to extract tears the way theme parks extract at least a twenty every time your kid spots a stuffed animal. What I found in Reminders of Him was something more honest, even if the film doesn’t always deliver on everything it reaches for.

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As a new dad, I am not, at the moment, a man with particularly thick cinematic armor. Kenna’s struggle to claim the right to simply exist near her child hit me somewhere below the sternum. Maika Monroe plays her with an earthy, sorrowful vibrance, tough but breakable, hardened by prison without being calcified by it. She doesn’t ask us to forgive Kenna outright. She asks us to watch her try.

Set........

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