Movie Review: Goodbye June (2025)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Kate Winslet  

Starring: Kate Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette, Helen Mirren, Timothy Spall, Johnny Flynn  

Running Time: 114 minutes  

Synopsis: In England, elderly cancer patient June (Helen Mirren) is hospitalized just before Christmas, and doctors determine that her death is near. Her family gathers, including husband Bernie (Timothy Spall), daughters Julia (Kate Winslet), Molly (Andrea Riseborough), and Helen (Toni Collette), and son Connor (Johnny Flynn). The responsible Julia and highly strung Molly are barely on speaking terms, while Helen is into new age mysticism and Connor suffers from anxieties. From her hospital death bed, June tries to bring the family together.

What Works Well: In her directorial debut, Kate Winslet tries to inject a few flashes of style into the sappy and mundane material, but is hampered by a limited number of sets (most of the drama takes place around June's hospital bed). The stellar cast members do deliver steady performances, and each family member gets a few moments to shine. A bit of spiky humour breaks through the gloom.

What Does Not Work As Well: Quite inferior to similar families-waiting-for-death dramas like Two Weeks, Blackbird, and His Three Daughters, here the characters are stereotypes, the emotions superficial, conflicts are contrived, and the public hospital is remarkably tidy, empty, and attentive. Seemingly intractable years-long disputes are resolved by saccharine soliloquies ("I envy you" is matched by "I work so hard") before being sealed with a hug. The running time is a solid 20 minutes too long, and to triple underline "harried mom" and "circle of life" tropes, most scenes are cluttered with gaggles of children being shuffled in and out of cars and strollers.

Key Quote:

June: Maybe if I'm lucky I'll come back as snow.

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Movie Review: Burden (2018)

A racism drama, Burden explores a small community plagued by white supremacists and one man's personal struggle to build a different life.

The setting is the small town of Laurens, South Carolina in 1996. Local Klu Klux Klan leader Tom Griffin (Tom Wilkinson) opens The Redneck Shop as a museum to celebrate white supremacy. His protege is Mike Burden (Garrett Hedlund), an army veteran abandoned as a child and raised by Tom. Black Reverend Kennedy (Forest Whitaker) is the head of the local Baptist Church and resists the supremacists with a message of love.

The Redneck Shop heightens tensions between the black community and Klan members, including incidents of racial abuse and violence. In the meantime Mike meets single mom Judy (Angela Riseborough) and they start a relationship, with Mike providing a father figure to Judy's young son Franklin. But Judy cannot tolerate being in a relationship with a Klan member, and asks Mike to make a choice, leading to grim consequences.

Based on a true story, Burden ventures into forgotten small town America bypassed by education, employment and economic prospects, where the white population refer to themselves as white trash. Writer and director Andrew Heckler creates a working class milieu devoid of hope and ambition, with the KKK's Tom Griffin and Reverend Kennedy engaged in an ongoing battle for a community's soul. Emotions are always close to the surface and Burden is never subtle, mirroring Laurens as a town stuck between a past that never left and a future that never arrived.

Here a man like Griffin can hold sway over all businesses and the police, and is free to openly practice his virulent form of hatred. He is a master at poisoning hearts and minds at a young age, then wields financial influence to exert continued control. Tom Wilkinson combines cold with smiley, oozing a pure representation of menace. In the opposite corner Forest Whitaker juggles faith with pragmatism as the Baptist reverend Kennedy, his family's patience running thin as he defies naked hate with gestures of kindness.

Caught in the middle is Mike Burden, and Heckler crafts a forceful arc for a simple man confronting deeply instilled demons, helped by internal fortitude and external support. Barely educated, functionally raised by the Klan and physically damaged during his army service, he is trusted enough by Tom to hold the lease to The Redneck Shop. But Burden's soul awakens once subjected to influences exerted purposefully by Judy and innocently by young Franklin and his black friend. Garrett Hedlund conveys Burden's fatigue as he questions all he was raised to believe, just as his gaunt frame wearily navigates odd angles caused by army injuries. 

Burden offers a spark of hope but also clear-eyed realism. One man does stumble upon a moment of reckoning, but a detestable movement remains deeply rooted.



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Movie Review: Oblivion (2013)

A post-apocalyptic science fiction drama, Oblivion is visually gorgeous but compromised by substantive logic gaps.

In 2077, the moon has been destroyed and Earth is uninhabitable after a war with invading alien scavengers ("scavs"). The humans won the war but relocated to Saturn's Titan moon, leaving the gigantic Tet spaceship to orbit Earth. 

Maintenance technician Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his communications partner Vika (Andrea Riseborough) are among the few humans on Earth. Taking instructions from their commander Sally (Melissa Leo) on Tet, they are completing a five year stint maintaining military drones that hunt remaining scavs and protect massive generators converting the ocean's waters to energy.

Jack and Vika are supposed to have had their memories wiped before their maintenance mission, but Jack suffers from persistent flashbacks featuring a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko). He has also discovered a pasture where nature is recovering, and he yearns to stay on Earth. After he locates a signal broadcasting into space, a human spaceship crash lands. The behaviour of the drones at the crash site and the story of the sole survivor force Jack to question everything he knows.

A combination of dystopian nightmare and hopeful resiliency-of-humanity epic, Oblivion offers plenty to admire. Written and directed by Joseph Kosinski, the cinematography is a feast for the eyes. With seamless CGI effects, the destroyed and abandoned Earth is a desolate, engrossing place, haunted by the remnants of an exploded moon. The command centre in the sky is sleek, and the spacecrafts and drones are clever, agile machines. 

Starting with a well-constructed premise but always hinting at the potential for curves, the plot basics are intriguing. Kosinski reveals the hidden layers of his story in increments, maintaining a good level of curiosity with a succession of twists. Unfortunately, many of the highlights are also familiar from other movies, and under any cursory level of examination the plot details disintegrate.

Also less successful are a couple of unnecessary action scenes thrown in as a check-box exercise. These are notably out of place and poorly executed. The drones invade a hideout, and then pursue a craft in canyon-like terrain, and both sequences are derivative, choppy, and edited with a hatchet.

The cast is small and led by a typically magnetic Tom Cruise performance. Jack Harper benefits from a complex backstory, and Cruise savours it with inquisitive conviction. Andrea Riseborough teases out the tension within a conflicted character, but Melissa Leo has less to. Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau enter the narrative about halfway through in smallish but pivotal roles.

Oblivion works best as a tableau of artistry, a vision to be admired from a distance, the details best left unexamined.



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Movie Review: Shepherds And Butchers (2016)

A prison and courtroom drama, Shepherds And Butchers condemns capital punishment, but makes the same point early and often. 

South Africa, 1987. On a deserted road, maximum security prison warden Leon Labuschagne (Garion Dowds) shoots dead seven members of a football team. He is arrested and does not deny the multiple murder charges. Anti-death penalty lawyer John Weber (Steve Coogan) is appointed as his defence attorney, with Kathleen Marais (Andrea Riseborough) prosecuting.

With the facts not in dispute but no explicable motive, Weber focusses his defence on Leon's broken mental state. As a young prison guard, he participated in numerous prisoner executions over two years. The harrowing hangings, often of seven prisoners at a time, included men who Leon had befriended. In the court proceedings, Weber places the defendant on the stand to extract excruciating details, and attempts to blame the uncaring system for triggering irrational murderous impulses.

A South African co-production inspired by real events, Shepherds And Butchers sidesteps the racism issues of the apartheid era, despite all seven victims of Leon's rampage being Black. Instead, writer and director Oliver Schmitz unapologetically takes aim at the horrors of a badly mismanaged prison system and a culture of routine mass executions sanctioned by the state.

While movies like The Green Mile and Dead Man Walking closely examine the mechanics and moralities of capital punishment, Shepherds And Butchers goes much further: the execution scenes as recounted from the courtroom witness stand are brutal and difficult to stomach. Schmitz spares no detail, from the panic descending on the inmates to the snapping of necks, the subsequent clean-up of fluids and the slipshod burials. This is court-approved murder en masse, and the film firmly makes a stand against killing as punishment for killing.

But while undoubtedly powerful and provocative, the drama is also monotonal. Through John Weber's principled stance, the defence tactic to establish execution horrors as a trigger for Leon's quiet madness is established early. Schmitz invests the rest of the time exposing a deeper hell hole, the courtroom judge providing Weber with plenty of leeway to delve into minutia, the prosecutor remarkably acquiescent. The re-emphasis is perhaps appropriate for a robust defence, but the narrative momentum stalls early then yields to mounting repugnance.

The courtroom scenes are elegant and present a cultured debate and discovery environment. With Leon having refused to talk before testifying, Weber adopts a rare flying blind strategy, unsure where the defendant's answers will go but pursuing his instincts to reveal the damage suffered by a seventeen year old thrown into a gory milieu with no training or support. Resolute and virtuous, Shepherds And Butchers is also blunt and brutal.



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The Movies Of Andrea Riseborough

All movies starring Andrea Riseborough and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Made In Dagenham (2010)

Oblivion (2013)

Birdman (2014)

Shepherds And Butchers (2016)

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

Battle Of The Sexes (2017)

The Death Of Stalin (2017)

Burden (2018)

Amsterdam (2022)

Lee (2023)

Goodbye June (2025)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Battle Of The Sexes (2017)

A biography of tennis legend Billie Jean King around the time of her famous showdown with Bobby Riggs, Battle Of The Sexes reveals the tumult behind the headlines but doesn't quite achieve the intended emotional heights.

It's 1973, and 29 year old Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) is on top of the tennis world. When tournament organizer Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) refuses to close the gender pay gap, King leads a renegade group of players in the establishment of the Women's Tennis Association, with her friend Gladys (Sarah Silverman) as manager. Although married to Larry (Austin Stowell), King meets and starts a secret lesbian affair with hairdresser Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough).

Meanwhile, former tennis champ Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) is now 55 years old, a compulsive (but successful) gambler much to the disdain of his wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue). He is also a self-professed male chauvinist pig. Sensing an opportunity to make money and reclaim the spotlight, Riggs tries to goad King into a publicity-grabbing "battle of the sexes" televized tennis match. She refuses, but Riggs does find an opponent in Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee). The outcome of that game forces King into accepting Riggs' challenge, although her private life is in turmoil.

Directed by the duo of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Battle Of The Sexes takes on plenty of weighty topics. The early 1970s witnessed the confluence of turbulent currents that had been building up over a decade, and finally feminism, sexuality, money, broadcasting and politics started to fully come together.

The specific tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King was just that: a one-off, made-for-television stunt event, but it also carried the winds of change: if the reigning queen of women's tennis, carrying the torch of pay equity, could not defeat a loudmouth overweight over-the-hill sexist man in his mid-50s, the cultural setbacks would have propagated far from the tennis court.

Dayton and Faris, working from a script by Simon Beaufoy, are workmanlike in capturing the events of the times, but the central character's spirit eludes them. The film largely focuses on King as she helps form the WTA, meets Marilyn and awakens to her sexuality. Despite a focused Emma Stone performance, King's energy and societal drivers are notably missing. The film meets her at the peak, a woman demanding change while grappling with fundamental personal changes. How and why King got here are absent, an unfortunate gap in a biographical film.

Riggs is very much a supporting character, a caricature battling his middle-age demons and refusing to grow up because his wealth means he does not have to. The rest of the characters are fleeting. Marilyn remains an ethereal partner, more a muse than a person. Riggs' wife Priscilla and WTA organizer Gladys drop in and mostly out of the story.

The match itself forms the climax of the film, and is well presented as an inflated media circus, King cutting a lonely figure as she singularly enters a noisy arena in a world tilted against women's equality. Her on-the-court public showdown contrasts well with her private life, King compelled to keep her relationship with Marilyn a secret despite the whispers, the battle to come for gay rights already visible, but for now still ahead.

Battle Of The Sexes is a good serve, but misses the ace.

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