Regretting You (2025)    Paramount/Drama    RT: 117 minutes    Rated PG-13 (sexual content, teen drug and alcohol use, brief strong language)    Director: Josh Boone    Screenplay: Susan McMartin    Music: Nathaniel Walcott    Cinematography: Tim Orr    Release date: October 24, 2025 (US)    Cast: Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Willa Fitzgerald, Scott Eastwood, Clancy Brown, Sam Morelos, Ethan Costanilla.

Rating: ***

 Colleen Hoover is the new Nicholas Sparks.

 Now that Hollywood appears to be done with The Notebook author- the last Sparks adaptation being 2016’s The Choice- Hoover looks to be the heir apparent to his throne. Last year, it was the domestic abuse drama It Ends with Us. Next year, it’s Reminder of Him (the trailer just dropped). Right now, we’ve got Regretting You, a drama about loss and young romance. Strange bedfellows, you say? They are indeed.

 I’m going to go ahead and address now the bad reviews Regretting You has been getting slammed with. I can see why critics don’t like it. It’s not exactly fine art cinema. It’s a tearjerker, the kind of movie girls go to see to have a good cry. It’s directed by Josh Boone, the guy behind The Fault in Our Stars, one of the better teen tearjerkers of the past fifteen or so years. He’s the natural choice to helm Regretting You, a flawed film for sure. But guess what? I kind of like it.

 High school senior Clara (Grace, Young Sheldon) has a pretty good life. She’s a happy kid. She lives in one of those small fictional towns (in North Carolina) that feel disconnected from the rest of the world. She has a loving family, a cool best friend Lexie (Morelos, That 90s Show) and the attention of her crush, local bad boy Miller (Thames, The Black Phone 1 & 2) who really isn’t a bad boy. People just think he is because his dad’s in jail for selling weed.

 Then, as it so often does, tragedy strikes. Her father Chris (Eastwood, The Longest Ride) dies in a car accident. She and her mother Morgan (Williams, M3GAN) are devastated. It gets worse. He wasn’t alone in the car. Her aunt Jenny (Fitzgerald, Reacher) was with him. She leaves behind a husband Jonah (Franco, Now You See Me) and infant son. Are you ready for the real kicker? The dad and the aunt, it turns out, were having an affair. It had been going on for some time. Naturally, it makes things worse on everybody involved. Ever the protective mom, Morgan decides it’s in her daughter’s best interests to share this bit of info with her.

 It goes without saying things are a little more complicated than I’ve described. Morgan and Jonah have a history together. He liked her in high school but couldn’t get up the courage to tell her. Then she got pregnant with Chris’ child. They got married and Jonah left town. Now that their respective partners are out of the picture, old feelings start to resurface.

 Now that you know the tragedy, let’s talk about the teen romance. Something develops between Clara and Miller. It could be love, first love. It could also be Clara rebelling against her mother, a manifestation of her grief. I’d say it’s a little of both. The usual stuff happens from the nighttime sneak-outs to grand romantic gestures to the misunderstanding that almost tears them apart. They talk about things like prom and losing their virginity. Emotions are heightened. Clara fights with her mother who keeps grounding her. Everything feels like a big drama. It’s first love as we all know it to be.

 There’s a lot going on in Regretting You and Boone stumbles a little with the narrative. It’s all over the place, never really settling on one thing for too long. It tries to do a lot, cramming a lot of drama into two hours. It doesn’t miss a step in that respect. We even get a character, Miller’s grandfather/guardian (Brown, Highlander), with cancer. Not too much is done with this aside from serving as a reason for Miller not to pursue his dream of attending film school. It’s a tricky balancing act and writer Susan McMartin doesn’t quite land it.

 I first took notice of Mckenna Grace in the 2017 drama Gifted in which she played a young math prodigy. I knew she was going places. She does a good job as Clara, a 17YO who dreams of becoming an actress despite her mother urging her to be more realistic in her goals. She absolutely nails the emotional aspect of her character with her grief feeling palpable. Williams also does a fine job as the mother barely holding on while trying to simultaneously process grief and betrayal. She veers between depression and anger, camping out on the couch watching reality shows while drinking wine by the bottle.

 Franco is pretty good as the widower blindsided by the whole situation. On top of that, he’s now the sole caretaker of a helpless baby. You can see the panic written all over him even if it doesn’t always come out. Thames, who has great chemistry with Mckenna (his real-life gf), does okay as Miller. He delivers a restrained performance that would normally feel out of place in a tearjerker but feels just right here.

 What can I say? I’m a sucker for dopey dramas like Regretting You. Surprisingly, it doesn’t lean too hard into melodrama. It’s almost as if Boone holds back a little. I say he should have let it all out. Make the emotions big. Is that not the point of these films? Either way, I liked Regretting You. It’s not the best of its kind, but it’s far from the worst. Its target audience will love it.