Mary Anning

The scouts

It's a prestige biopic about a woman geologist—exactly the kind of thing festivals love—but Mattocks doesn't subvert the form, she respects it, which means I'm left watching a well-made but fundamentally expected story about exclusion and ambition.

Mattocks locates Mary Anning within a visual and tonal lineage of British period cinema while treating the archive—the cliffs, the specimens, the Society's rejection—as both historical document and emotional landscape; the film knows exactly what tradition it's in and why.

What carries this isn't the biographical framework but the decision to let the landscape and Anning's solitary labor do the narrative work—the choice to make fossil hunting meditative rather than triumphant, which is where the film's actual singularity lives.