It’s a lyrical and rapturous film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking.
83
The Film StageJared Mobarak
The Film StageJared Mobarak
Its authentic depiction of unprepared young love is delicately innocent.
75
Slant MagazineChuck Bowen
Slant MagazineChuck Bowen
The film’s imaginative daring springs from its willingness to render repression sexy, even if it will prove to be the seed of a young couple’s dissolution.
It is a tender and valuable film, well acted, with a shrewd eye for how naive you can be in your early 20s, how impatient, how pompous, how tragicomically un-self-aware.
On Chesil Beach offers up so many tricky tonal changes, enough that Cooke eventually gives them over to a single note: limp.
50
The PlaylistKevin Jagernauth
The PlaylistKevin Jagernauth
On Chesil Beach makes us consider the lives of the Florence and Edward as outside observers, but rarely takes us inside the complicated mix of desire and fear this pair is trying to untangle.
50
Screen DailyWendy Ide
Screen DailyWendy Ide
Even with author Ian McEwan adapting his own novel for the screen, this somewhat stilted picture struggles to convey the deft emotional complexity of the source material.