Movie Review: Ammonite

What a treat of a movie! Kate Winslet shows, once again, how great acting isn't about who can shout the loudest, but who can convey the most meaning through a single glance.

It is a movie of delightful contrasts - the sound design is overpoweringly loud, until it suddenly disappears. The silence is rarely punctuated with anything so crude as dialogue. In a way, the sex scenes feel not gratuitous, but superfluous. This isn't me being a prude - this is a movie about furtive glances and lingering hands, it feels jarring to go from one to the other. But I guess that fits in with the theme - silent rocks hiding massive, beautiful, revelations.

This isn't really a biography of Mary Anning - shamefully little is known about her - but it does its best to sketch in the gaps.

The film suffers a little bit from that classic trope of "isn't it terribly, terribly hard being an upper class woman with an unspecified malady?" Saoirse Ronan performs it well, but it doesn't give her much to play with.

A charming and beautiful movie.