FILM OF THE WEEK AMMONITE (Cert 15, 117 mins, Lionsgate Home Entertainment UK Ltd, Romance/Drama, available now via Premium Video On Demand rental, available from June 11 on Amazon Prime Video/BT TV Store/iTunes/Sky Store/TalkTalk TV Store and other download and streaming services, available from June 14 on DVD £19.
Ammonite: Winslet and Ronan shine in sensitive film
By IANS |
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Ammonite
Direction: Francis Lee
BY VINAYAK CHAKRAVORTY
Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan play out an intense romance in Francis Lee s bleak new arthouse effort that weaves fiction and speculation into a fabric of facts.
Lee s script is based in England of the 1800s and narrates the story of Mary Anning (Winslet), a fossil collector and palaeontologist who gained fame for her fossil findings along the English Channel. Lee borrows from an unsubstantiated slice of Mary s life to set up his narrative.
As the film begins, Mary is struggling to make ends meet. She has seen better days professionally, and when a wealthy geologist approaches Mary to entrust her with the job of looking after his ailing wife Charlotte (Ronan) while he is away on tour, she cannot afford to say no. He also purchases an ammonite that Mary found at the sea shore.
Ammonite Review: Kate Winslet s Unblemished Performance Makes This A Treat To Watch - 3.5 Stars
Ammonite Review: Kate Winslet s Unblemished Performance Makes This A Treat To Watch - 3.5 Stars
Ammonite Review: Kate Winslet fleshes out the character with striking empathy and exactitude, Saoirse Ronan serves as the ideal foil.
Kate Winslet s fan page posted this picture. (Image courtesy: @kate.winslet.official)
Cast: Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan
Director: Francis Lee
Francis Lee s second directorial venture
Ammonite plays out in bleak, monotonous locales. The grey, cheerless hues reflect the dour routine of the life of one of the film s two protagonists, Mary Anning, whose visage is nearly always distant, impenetrable and immutable. Anning - Kate Winslet fleshes out the character with striking empathy and exactitude - was a 19th century English paleontologist who spent her life prowling the fossil beds and cliffs along the English Channel in Lyme Regis, Dorset, ferreting for
Julie Delpy seems to always be the life force for any film that she stars in. In Richard Linklater’s romantic Before trilogy, her Céline was the sun; in her own projects as a writer/director/actor, she s embodied the slight screwball that can emerge from real-life situations, whether they involve electric relationships (“2 Days in Paris,” 2 Days in New York ) or romps about a jealous adult son s sabotage (“Lolo”). And because it’s Delpy determining the energy, the movies are grounded in their own unique space, somewhere between only in the movies and just like real life.
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In “My Zoe,” her latest film as a writer/director/actor, Delpy s character Isabelle is the mourning blue of its melancholic story, which presents a mother and ex-wife grieving over her daughter Zoe (Sophia Ally) falling into a coma, while clashing with her ex-husband James (Richard Armitage), and opting for a futuristic way out of her pain. Delpy handles this in such
Ammonite is a fictional piece of filmmaking loosely based on the life of famed palaeontologist Mary Anning. The film is set in 1840s England in a small seaside town called Lyme Regis on the English. . .