Kate has directed her first movie “Goodbye June”, she stars in the film, along with Helen Mirren, Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough and Johnny Flynn. The movie will debut in select theaters in US and the UK, and on Netflix on December 12th.

Empire cites: A strong directorial debut from Winslet with — as you’d expect — stellar performances from her cast. It might be the perfect antidote to other, overly saccharine Christmas films.

Official Trailer:

The Guardian: ‘I lived out moments of my mother’s passing I never saw’: Kate Winslet on grief, going red and Goodbye June

For her directorial debut, Winslet assembled a cast including Toni Collette, Timothy Spall, Johnny Flynn and Andrea Riseborough to tell a story inspired by her own family’s bereavement. The actors talk mourning, immortality and hospital vending machines.

In 2017, Sally Bridges-Winslet died of cancer. She was 71. It was, her youngest daughter said, “like the north star just dropped out of the sky”.

It would have been even worse, says Kate Winslet today, had the family not pulled together. “I do have tremendous amounts of peace and acceptance around what happened because of how we were able to make it for her.”

Winslet’s eldest son, Joe, was then 13. “For him as a child, seeing that love poured into this moment was huge. And then he discovered through conversations with friends that that’s so rarely the case.”

Six years later, in 2023, Joe decided to turn the experience into a screenplay. A few drafts and some heavy-duty casting later and it’s a movie, starring Helen Mirren as dying matriarch June, Timothy Spall as her blithe husband, Bernie, plus Toni Collette (flighty hippy), Andrea Riseborough (organic fascist) and Johnny Flynn (oversensitive) as three of their children. Winslet plays the fourth (stressed exec); the film is also her directorial debut.

“However much I would try to separate my own personal experience from the experience we were having as this fictional family,” she says, “it was almost impossible. At times I almost felt like I was living out moments of my own mother’s passing that I never would have witnessed. So directing actors in a tender way without falling apart in the corner was definitely part of the challenge.”

(…) Read the full review at The Guardian website

Variety: ‘Goodbye June’ Review: Kate Winslet Makes Her Directorial Debut With a Formulaic Family Weepie

The star enlists an enviable big-name ensemble to enliven a script by her 21-year-old son Joe Anders, but they can’t mask the shallow sentimentality of the material.

Everyone is juggling a multitude of problems in “Goodbye June” — some bigger than others, though they combine to give this holiday-season drama a greater-than-usual air of December frazzlement. “All I want is a cancer-free mother and some fucking sheep’s yogurt,” moans Andrea Riseborough’s short-fused homemaker Molly: issues presumably listed in descending order of importance, as the script lands one of several jabs at bourgeois middle-class priorities. It’s a slightly odd satirical note to repeatedly strike in a film with wholly A-list pedigree. Written by 21-year-old Joe Anders and directed by his mother Kate Winslet, this simple, sentimental family portrait lacks the ring of lived experience at more than one level.

The not-cancer-free mother in this case is (you guessed it) June, played with stoically good-humored poise by a bedridden Helen Mirren, persistently smiling against the dying of the light. Given less than a month to live by doctors after a series of failed chemotherapy treatments, and choosing to see out her time on Earth in a private hospital room in the English town of Cheltenham, she’s the calm locus around which the rest of the film’s characters flap, flutter and squabble. Her impending demise, racing for second place against the imperilled family Christmas, provides a tight deadline for the resolution of various lingering feuds and hidden truths.

(…)

Lest things get too glum, “Goodbye June” rallies at the eleventh hour with an elaborately cutesy let’s-put-on-a-Nativity-show sequence that, if nothing else, shores up its holiday-movie credentials beyond the tinsel-draped set-dressing and assorted carols embellishing Ben Harlan’s plaintive, piano-heavy score. (Even the lensing, by the accomplished Alwin H. Küchler, is relentlessly warm and gold-flecked: No NHS hospital ward has ever looked so homey.) The family that plays together, it turns out, stays together. Like much else here, the scene is a deflection from harsher mortal realities: Angel declares that his professional mission is to give all his patients “a good goodbye.” Putting to one side any uglier consequences of illness or less fixable emotional wounds, the film follows suit — though there’s only a glancing sense here that death is for life, not just for Christmas.

For full review, please visit Variety website.

Empire Online Review:
June (Helen Mirren) is taken to hospital and learns that her cancer has recurred and the end is nigh. Her family gather at her bedside and must put aside their bickering to say goodbye.

The best Christmas movies have a bittersweet tinge, but in Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, the sadness is front and centre. There’s more of the grave than of gravy about this story of a family saying goodbye to their ailing matriarch, but also a strange sense of hope in the efforts of all involved to make their mother’s last days as comfortable as possible.

Helen Mirren is the titular June, a woman who’s approaching her death with remarkable stoicism but no false saintliness. She wants to leave her family in a better place, though she’d rather not leave them at all. Her husband Bernie (Timothy Spall) is doing his level best to avoid the whole question, while her son Connor (Johnny Flynn) is so emotionally raw already that he’s like an open wound. But it’s her daughters who are June’s biggest concern: Julia (Winslet), with the weight of the world on her shoulders; organic obsessive Molly (Andrea Riseborough), who nearly vibrates with agitation in every scene; and woo-woo Helen (Toni Collette), the one who’s always been faintly unmoored. Add in assorted spouses and grandchildren, and it makes for a full visitors’ schedule but a febrile mix of intense emotions.

Winslet’s son Joe Anders wrote the script, and for the most part it’s an excellent first effort that digs into the strange mix of sadness and humour and sometimes fury that death can provoke.

For the full review, please check Empire Online Website