Take everything good about Portrait of a Lady on Fire and throw it in the bin but keep all of the surface similarities and you’ve got Ammonite. An interminably dry exercise in prestige bait that casts two awards certified actresses to woefully try and convince us that they would fall for each other out of nowhere, seemingly for zero reason, despite the fact that they have absolutely no chemistry. I don’t know if I’ve seen a film recently with two actors as unconvincing in their romantic relationship as Winslet and Ronan here. And watching how intimate Francis Lee pushes the sex scenes to be just makes it even tougher to get through, as there’s this cringey awkwardness to watching Ronan sit on Winslet’s face because it doesn’t even feel like either of them wants to be there. This is the kind of movie that feels manufactured for awards, and it was fairly excruciating to get through. As dry as the rocks on that grey, dreary beach. The gays deserve better than this.

Added to 2020 ranked