Lee (2023)

Lee hangs an extraordinary life on the most ordinary frame a biopic can have: a 1977 interview and flashbacks marching in order. Kate Winslet is the reason it works anyway. Her Lee Miller has swapped modeling in New York for a camera and a bohemian life in France, where she meets Roland Penrose in 1937. She follows him to London and lands at British Vogue, shooting the Blitz while the rules keep women away from the front. When America enters the war, she becomes a correspondent beside photographer David Scherman, played by Andy Samberg, and pushes her way toward the fighting. From Saint-Malo to liberated Paris to the camps in Germany, the film follows what she chose to witness, and it handles what she found there with care. Critics called the structure conventional, and they’re right, with a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes. A 6.8 because Winslet gives a commanding performance that the film around her never quite matches. $11.33 says you look up Lee Miller’s real photographs tonight and sit with them a while.

What works: Winslet commands every scene, and the war sections give real weight to how hard Miller had to fight just to be allowed near the front.

What doesn’t: The interview frame and the steady march of flashbacks make it a disappointingly conventional biopic about a woman who was anything but conventional.

Who it’s for: History readers, photography lovers and anyone who wants to know the woman who carried a camera into some of the war’s darkest places.