Variety by Owen Gleiberman

It’s a lyrical and rapturous film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

On Chesil Beach is a beautifully made film that is as difficult to write about as it is to watch, and it is inescapably hard to watch. Yet the reasons it is difficult — a completely heartbreaking story brought to exquisite life via immaculate writing, directing and acting — are why it's worth putting up with the pain.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Mark Medley

The lead actors are both marvellous.... Yet the film’s most impressive performance might come from director Dominic Cooke, who has delivered an assured, wistful debut.

The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak

Its authentic depiction of unprepared young love is delicately innocent.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Onscreen, On Chesil Beach loses some intensity at the end, as the supple suggestiveness of Mr. McEwan’s prose is replaced by the stagy literalness of film. Perhaps this couldn’t be avoided.

Slant Magazine by Chuck 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.

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

On Chesil Beach can feel like observing a deli worker slice a small piece of rancid cured meat, in increasingly transparent slivers of prosciutto-like thinness, and then holding them up to the light for inspection.

Boston Globe by Tom Russo

Veteran London theater director Dominic Cooke (the BBC’s “The Hollow Crown”) and acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan adapt the fractured-narrative feature from McEwan’s book, enhancing the elegant prose with additional bits of rich characterization and handsomely shot scenery.

Entertainment Weekly by Leah Greenblatt

Director Dominic Cooke is mostly known for his Olivier Award-winning theater work, but Chesil never feels stagey or static. It’s beautifully shot, and he pulls lovely performances from both his leads.

The A.V. Club by Vikram Murthi

On Chesil Beach is a minor story by design, one that uses a lovers’ quarrel to interrogate evolving social values, but sometimes it’s the most minor stories that contain some of the most overlooked ideas.

The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young

This film of delicate emotional nuance recounts an enchanting but sad love story.

Empire

An opulent, well crafted and acted tale of emotional repression that captures the head more than the heart.

Total Film by Jamie Graham

A decent adaptation of McEwan’s excellent novella. Forget Fifty Shades – this is sex to make your cheeks blush.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

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.

IndieWire by Kate Erbland

On Chesil Beach offers up so many tricky tonal changes, enough that Cooke eventually gives them over to a single note: limp.

Screen Daily by Wendy 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.

Screen International by Wendy 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.

The Playlist by Kevin 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.