There's no-one quite like Grandma: "Goodbye June"

For her directorial debut, Kate Winslet has called in favours from thespian pals and a script by her own 21-year-old son (Joe Anders, via Sam Mendes) which might have been better off pinned to a fridge. The filmmaker Winslet has taken her cues from isn't Jane Campion or Jim Cameron - precisely zero boundaries are being challenged here - but the Nancy Meyers who did The Holiday: we're getting something both familiar and familial. (And the mumsiest directorial debut in recent cinema history: you suspect that, before calling action, Winslet personally went round tidying up her cast's faces with a saliva-wettened tissue.) It's post-Brexit Nancy Meyers at that: cheaper, shabbier, stressy, passive-aggressive rather than aspirational. Much of Goodbye June unfolds around the corridors and waiting rooms of an NHS hospital in Cheltenham. After the titular grandmother (Helen Mirren) collapses one Christmas, the rest of her family - harrumphing husband Timothy Spall, the pair's adult children (Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Johnny Flynn, Toni Collette) and their own kids - congregate at the matriach's bedside awaiting further news; while doctors move in and out, and June's health goes up and down, her offspring begin to thrash out their issues. It's very much that kind of movie: the siblings bicker and snipe, Mirren rouses herself to interrupt with an occasional homily or other groan, and on the far side of 110 minutes, after an impromptu oncology-ward nativity, everyone ends up in a more peaceful and settled place. We know exactly what we're getting for Christmas.

As with Netflix UK's other late 2025 offering Steve, however, might we have preferred something less conspicuously threadbare, blessed with greater coherence, festive comfort and connective (rather than paper) tissue? It shouldn't matter that these players never really resemble a family - that they are, visibly, a handful of the director's favourites corralled together for a few weeks' shooting. (Even so, we've ended up in a world where Kate Winslet and Andrea Riseborough are apparently sisters despite totally diverse accents, and where Riseborough has somehow ended up married to Stephen Merchant, so the casting wasn't high on anybody's priorities.) It does matter, I'm afraid, that Goodbye June is sedentary verging on the outright flat. Winslet divides her actors up into manageable groups of twos and threes, forgetting to do anything much with the movie around them; it often feels as if she's filmed the shooting schedule rather than the script. We, meanwhile, are left sitting around waiting for Mirren's June to make good on the morbid promise of the title. (Merry Christmas everyone! Don't forget to book yourself in for that flu jab.) There are bright spots: the odd scene where the acting saves the day; Spall is enjoying himself, singing and getting a nice ham roll for his troubles; and Winslet is good with kids. (Arguably the grandchildren, afforded a freeish rein, are more fun to watch than the grown-ups, stuck in varyingly stock characterisations and behaving much as people in this type of film typically behave: I've lost track of how many times I've now seen Toni Collette playing the New Age sister, burning sage and banging a tambour in a way nobody in the real world ever has.) Still: favours were called in, Netflix pounced, and now there's a gap in the heart of the Yuletide terrestrial TV schedules that ITV are going to have to plug with two hours of Stephen Mulhern pulling crackers or something.

Goodbye June is now playing in selected cinemas, and streams on Netflix from Christmas Eve.