Lee

Ellen Kuras spent three decades as one of American cinema's most respected cinematographers — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blow, Summer of Sam — before making Lee, her first narrative feature as director. It premiered as a Gala Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 and reached cinemas a year later. Kate Winslet, who plays Lee Miller, also produced, and spent the better part of a decade developing the project from Antony Penrose's biography The Lives of Lee Miller — Penrose being Miller's son, who found the bulk of her war photography in her attic after her death.

Miller was a Vogue model and a fixture of Surrealist Paris, Man Ray's collaborator and later Roland Penrose's partner, before the Second World War made her something else. The film picks her up in the late 1930s and follows her accreditation as a war correspondent for British Vogue, one of very few women permitted near the advance across Europe. Alexander Skarsgård plays Penrose, Andy Samberg the Life photographer David E. Scherman, Andrea Riseborough the editor Audrey Withers. Paweł Edelman, who shot The Pianist, works in a muted register that keeps faith with Miller's own black-and-white frames.

Reception divided along a familiar line: near-unanimous praise for Winslet, who took a Golden Globe nomination and carried the film to a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film, against a consensus that the surrounding structure is more conventional than its subject. That tension is the film's real interest. Miller has been steadily reclaimed as one of the significant photographers of the war, and Lee is the most substantial attempt yet to put her back in general circulation.