Ammonite

Kate Winslet gives one of her most achingly vulnerable performances in Francis Lee's sea-lashed paean to the things that give us life, and our struggle to find them. A fictionalised account of the life of British palaeontologist Mary Anning, Ammonite sees Winslet playing Mary as a woman slowly calcifying within the confines of her life. Combing the Lyme Regis coastline of the 1840s for fossils, she's poor and worn down, and certainly doesn't have time to care for a sickly young socialite (Saoirse Ronan) who is foisted upon her during a coastal stay. As the pair spend time together, though, the rough edges of their forced friendship are smoothed, and a quiet but passionate love affair develops. Shooting with the same poetic eye he brought to God's Own Country, Lee again proves that, like Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay, he is a master at charting human struggle through symbolic shots of wild nature. Determinedly unstuffy and brimming with wit, Ammonite is a love story of rare and candid beauty that finds hope in the most unexpected of places.