I felt it was a little absurd at the time – but actually, this is a movie that improves in retrospect. It is ambitious and heartfelt
Was By the Sea the last therapeutic gasp for Brangelina? The couple they portrayed on screen were working through their problems, and perhaps Brad and Angelina were working through their own problems too. Or perhaps they were doing the opposite: creating a massive delusional diversionary tactic, a fiction that looked equivalent to their own problems but wasn’t, a giant project with which they could wrest back creative control of their personal lives from the gossips.

Jolie’s character in that film had no children, but the actor herself has a large family of adopted and biological children – a source of tension that is not really touched on in the film.

Perhaps they will work together again, and Burton-Taylor nostalgists might even wonder about the possibility of their remarrying. By the Sea deserves another look. They are certainly a really potent on-screen partnership