WEEK IN WOMEN: Kate Winslet’s GOODBYE JUNE plays Christmas Day – Brandy McDonnell reports
Academy Award–winning actor Kate Winslet’s (The Reader, Titanic, Mare of Easttown) star-studded directorial debut Goodbye June is heading to Netflix.
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Andrea Riseborough
GOODBYE JUNE – Review by Loren King
Kate Winslet makes her directing debut and stars in Goodbye June, from a script by her son Joe Anders. He’s crafted a moving story about a large family forced to cope suddenly with a dying matriarch during the Christmas season. Messy, tender, funny — the film will be relatable for anyone who’s cared for a declining elder or spent time with loved ones in hospital rooms and experienced the gamut of bittersweet emotions that come with facing mortality.
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GOODBYE JUNE Review by Leslie Combemale
Kate Winslet’s directorial debut Goodbye June tells the story of a family grappling with the imminent loss of their matriarch June, played by Helen Mirren. Her cancer has returned with a vengeance. That causes the family to scramble to bring everyone together for a final goodbye and a celebration of the holiday early, so she can take part. Eldest child Julia ( Winslet) spearheads the planning, while 30-something unlaunched son Connor (Johnny Flynn) tries to stuff his sadness, and stay-at-home mom and middle child Molly (Andrea Riseborough) silently fumes she’s not as involved in the decisions. Family new ager Helen (Toni Collette) rushes to get home from LA. June’s ineffectual husband Bernie (Timothy Spall) just waits to be told what to do, all while nurse Angel (Fisayo Akinade), who is acting as an unofficial death doula, tries to keep June comfortable while focusing on giving the family a “good goodbye”.
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MOVIE OF THE WEEK December 12, 2025: GOODBYE JUNE
Humor and pathos go hand in hand in Kate Winslet’s moving directorial debut Goodbye June. As the film — written by Winslet’s son, Joe Anders — follows a boisterous British family preparing to say a final goodbye to their beloved wife/mother/grandmother, it reminds viewers that death is an inevitable part of life, something to be planned for and accepted with grace and love, if not necessarily welcomed with open arms.
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DRAGONFLY (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Beth Accomando
Dragonfly is a showcase for actresses Brenda Blethyn and Andrea Riseborough. It’s a film that continually defies both expectations and categorization, as do its characters. Blethyn’s Elsie is very rooted in a real world grimness of aging, loneliness, and isolation. But it’s Riseborough who stunningly navigates Colleen’s complexities to rivet us. She’s simply fascinating. The film’s early social-realist vibes evoke memories of Mike Leigh’s films. Blethyn’s Elsie is very rooted in a real world grimness of aging, loneliness, and isolation. But it’s Riseborough who stunningly navigates Colleen’s complexities to rivet us. She’s simply fascinating. Dragonfly could almost be a two-hander stage play because of its tightly confined setting and richness of character development. But Williams does make it gracefully cinematic.
Read moreLEE – Review by Susan Granger
Kate Winslet devoted nearly a decade to bringing her passion project Lee, the story of Lee Miller, a hedonistic high-fashion-model-turned-war correspondent, to the screen – for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. Using the framing device of being ‘interviewed,’ Miller’s story begins in 1937 in the south of France, where – realizing that her modelling days were numbered – she turned to photography, became the audacious, bare-breasted muse of Dada artist Man Ray and eventually married British Surrealist Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard), who recruited artists for a ‘camouflage’ unit.
Read moreLEE – Review by Diane Carson
Lee profiles the legendary war photographer Lee Miller. Before plunging into Lee Miller’s formidable WWII photography, director Ellen Kuras begins Lee with Miller’s Vogue and Vanity Fair modeling career amidst her luxurious love life in Paris and London, lending this film poignant gravity. Based on Miller’s actual, bifurcated career, Lee’s contrasting worlds before and during WWII heighten the cinematic experience, especially given Lee’s conscientious witnessing of atrocities.
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MOVIE OF THE WEEK September 27, 2024: LEE
From the dark teenage drama of Heavenly Creatures to the gritty urban gloom of Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet is no stranger to playing strong, complicated women. She continues that streak here, clearly relishing the opportunity to tell the fascinating story of famed model/photographer/war correspondent Lee Miller in Ellen Kuras’ engrossing biopic Lee. As it follows Miller through the battlefields of World War II, the film makes it clear exactly why Miller and Winslet deserve to be known as legends.
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LEE – Review by Leslie Combemale
“There’s so much life in a person’s eyes, right up until the moment that there isn’t”, says Lee Miller in Ellen Kuras’s new bio-pic Lee. A historic war photographer and iconoclastic personality, Miller captured both sides of that truth with her camera, and her work is a lasting testament to her fearlessness and artistry. She captured some of the most indelible images from the decade that spanned before, during, and after World War II, including uniquely expressing the challenges for women in the war, as well as the tragedy and horror of the holocaust. Award-winning cinematographer Kuras makes her narrative directorial debut with Lee, which tells the story of the decade roughly between 1935 and 1945 from Lee Miller’s perspective.
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LEE – Review by Loren King
For those who don’t know much about the fascinating life of Lee Miller, Lee will immediately send you in search for books, documentaries and archives. That alone is a strong endorsement for any biopic. Anchored by a gritty performance by Kate Winslet as the model turned photographer whose work as a war correspondent during World War II yielded some of the first and still chilling images from the Nazi death camps, Lee depicts a life too big for a single film. Still, director Ellen Kuras and Winslet capture Miller’s artistic curiosity and core defiance that made her a woman far ahead of her time.
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