60
An opulent, well crafted and acted tale of emotional repression that captures the head more than the heart.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
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.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
This film of delicate emotional nuance recounts an enchanting but sad love story.
60
A decent adaptation of McEwan’s excellent novella. Forget Fifty Shades – this is sex to make your cheeks blush.
83
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Its authentic depiction of unprepared young love is delicately innocent.
58
On Chesil Beach offers up so many tricky tonal changes, enough that Cooke eventually gives them over to a single note: limp.
50
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.
100
It’s a lyrical and rapturous film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking.
60
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.
50
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.