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

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…