Lee

Near the end of World War II, Lee lands a job at British Vogue. At first, her keen eye for capturing her subjects’ essence finds purpose in portraits of the women partaking in the war effort at home. Yet, her interest lies in the front lines, where women are not allowed. Unwilling to back down from that goal, she manages to travel with American troops to document the armed conflict with her camera. Crafting impeccable, if not particularly striking images, cinematographer Pawel Edelman (“The Pianist”) lends “Lee” the kind of glossy grittiness expected from prestige Hollywood pictures set in this time period. There’s a standardly pristine quality even in scenes that happen amid the destruction.

That Lee was on the ground to take photos of the liberation of France and later of the abhorrent, unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust — including images of piles of emaciated bodies from Nazi concentration camps at a time when the magnitude of the atrocities was unknown — speaks of her reckless bravado, which Winslet embodies. Her most notorious work, however, was staging a morbid photo of herself inside Hitler’s private bathtub.