Metacritic reviews

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

Its authentic depiction of unprepared young love is delicately innocent.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.