A biography many years in the making by a woman who started out as a cinematographer and documentary filmmaker – no wonder then that the story of famous World War II photojournalist Lee Miller spoke to her.

In many ways a traditional but solid portrait of a woman who started out as a model but later became an accomplished photographer and felt compelled to document atrocities committed against women and children in Nazi concentration camps.

Makes a decent attempt to help us understand what motivated her, and the film also gets a tremendous boost from Kate Winslet’s performance. 

2024-U.K. 116 min. Color. Directed by Ellen Kuras. Screenplay: Liz Hannah, John Collee, Marion Hume. Book: Antony Penrose (”The Lives of Lee Miller”). Cast: Kate Winslet (Lee Miller), Marion Cotillard (Solange d’Ayen), Andrea Riseborough (Audrey Withers), Andy Samberg, Noémie Merlant, Josh O’Connor, Alexander Skarsgård. 

Trivia: Co-produced by Winslet. Jude Law was considered for a role.

Last word: “Before Lee, I had been working on a project about Emily Dickinson. It really prepared me for what was to come. Because Emily is a historical figure, the script had taken a lot of liberty with her life. And I just thought, ‘no, we can’t do this’. When I came to the Lee Miller script, I saw that it had similar qualities to the story about Emily Dickinson, meaning that it was a series of events, and it needed to have a stronger structure. It needed to have a story that was a beginning, middle and the end, within a movie that was just not the events of her life, and that also showed the other side of her – the darker side of her. Kate and I enlisted the help of writer Liz Hannah, who really helped to structure the story.” (Kuras, Shots)