The Sea

Impeccable acting does the heavy lifting in this low-key version of a John Banville novel – adapted by the writer himself. Ciarán Hinds is Max, an art historian who, when his wife dies, visits the British seaside town where he spent summers as a kid, picking at the scab of past trauma to blank out this latest grief. Using flashbacks, the film takes its time to get to that earlier tragedy, with newcomer Matthew Dillon playing Max, aged 12 or so. A boho-glam family has rented the big house in the village for the summer, and with all that red wine and posh swearing, you know this lot mean trouble. The film can’t match the novel’s elegant, startlingly excellent Booker-Prize-winning writing, but a first-class cast (including Charlotte Rampling and Sinéad Cusack) make this an absorbing watch.