• 177.873 movies
  • 12.196 shows
  • 33.962 seasons
  • 646.802 actors
  • 9.369.475 votes
Avatar
Profile
 
banner banner

Lee (2023)

Biography | 117 minutes
3,31 203 votes

Genre: Biography / Drama

Duration: 117 minuten

Country: United Kingdom / United States / Australia / Singapore / Hungary

Directed by: Ellen Kuras

Stars: Kate Winslet, Alexander Skarsgård and Andrea Riseborough

IMDb score: 6,9 (32.640)

Releasedate: 6 December 2023

Lee plot

Lee Miller becomes known as a fashion model. During World War II, she took her career in a completely different direction, traveling to Europe to report on the atrocities for Vogue magazine and to give a voice to those left unheard. She herself also struggles with a trauma that emerges as a result of betrayal.

Full Cast & Crew

Actors and actresses

Reviews & comments


avatar

Guest

  • messages
  • votes

Let op: In verband met copyright is het op MovieMeter.nl niet toegestaan om de inhoud van externe websites over te nemen, ook niet met bronvermelding. Je mag natuurlijk wel een link naar een externe pagina plaatsen, samen met je eigen beschrijving of eventueel de eerste alinea van de tekst. Je krijgt deze waarschuwing omdat het er op lijkt dat je een lange tekst hebt geplakt in je bericht.

* denotes required fields.

Pay attention! You cannot change your username afterwards.

* denotes required fields.
avatar van mrklm

mrklm

  • 11374 messages
  • 9897 votes

In 1938, former model and amateur photographer Lee Miller [Kate Winslet] is living a bon vivant life in France when she falls for Roland Penrose [Alexander Skarsgård] and moves in with him in London. She starts working as a photographer for 'Vogue' and is commissioned to document life on the home front at the start of World War II. She befriends her more experienced Jewish-American colleague David Scherman [Andy Samberg], with whom she (in a roundabout way) gets the chance to photograph on the military front in 1944. Winslet is excellent in the title role, but her character is superficially developed and you don't get any insight into what really drives her - why she drops everything for Roland remains a mystery. The contrived frame story, in which a journalist [Josh O'Connor] questions her about her life in 1977, further detracts from what the real Lee Miller was really about. Her portfolio is clearly many times more relevant than her life story.

dutch flagTranslated from Dutch · View original

avatar van hvdriel

hvdriel

  • 397 messages
  • 357 votes

Sure, I know a bit more about the photographer Lee Miller now: she was a recalcitrant model in the 1920s and 1930s, fell head over heels for the artist Roland Penrose [contrary to her character] and became a dogged war photographer who captured the harsh realities of WWII and after. Most of it went unpublished.

This description sounds a bit one-dimensional, and that's what the film is: a solid, professionally made, conventional biopic that doesn't focus on the person Lee Miller, but on her profession. The chosen form - an interview by a journalist with the older Lee Miller about her war photography - is too easy and above all annoying, whenever it interrupts the storyline. The twist at the end, like the famous uncle from America, is completely unnecessary and banal: a confession has to be the bearer of her doggedness that we have been watching for almost two hours.

Also thanks to Winslet's acting you get the feeling that there was much more to make of her life than this upright, one-dimensional peep-box with little to show for it cinematically. Just think that she was a muse of the surrealists in the twenties. How many opportunities were missed?

Texts at the end of the film really make clear the sadness of her working life, and that is of course a sign on the wall for a film. If the film had started with it, the forced second twist at the end would have been unnecessary.

dutch flagTranslated from Dutch · View original

avatar van blurp194

blurp194

  • 5484 messages
  • 4187 votes

Meh. Such a budget, such a cast, such a story and still make such a terribly lukewarm film out of it.

As a picture of the times, the film is too superficial, and as a biography much too thin. A frame story that adds nothing and only distracts. Nowhere is it even remotely palpable what it is like to see your work as a photographer being abused, or worse, ignored. What exactly do we learn about Lee Miller? Three times nothing. What historical value do Winslet and Merlant's bare breasts have in this picture? Three times nothing with a hint of exploitation.

If you want to know about photography in wartime, in the heyday of Time/Life and such, look up something like Minamata (2020). Lee would have deserved a film like that. He should have put something in there about how it feels, how it works when the phone rings, when you open that magazine with your photo. It's not that hard. He should have talked to a photographer, to start with.

dutch flagTranslated from Dutch · View original