Ellen Kuras brings a cinematographer’s attention to the people she films. We value that care, but her directing has yet to convince us: Lee is too dutiful, and the shared work of Scarpetta never holds together.
Fi1m perspective
In Lee (2024), Kate Winslet makes Lee Miller’s humour survive alongside her exhaustion. Kuras gives us a woman worth spending time with, then keeps hurrying through the history around her. We warmed to Winslet’s Miller because she can be funny without seeming any less worn down. The film is too busy explaining her to let that performance do enough of the work. It leaves us interested in Kuras’s directing, but not persuaded by it.
Her cinematography, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), is concerned with making a character’s feelings visible. That concern connects her documentary beginnings in the late 1980s with her narrative work for Spike Lee and Michel Gondry. The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) (2008), which she directed and shot, brought those jobs together. Television directing followed from around 2010, before Lee became her first dramatic feature as director. This was a gradual move between jobs that require different kinds of judgement.
Kuras treats camera placement, blocking and lighting as ways of putting us close to a character. She also uses changes in colour and contrast to follow a story’s emotional course. These are sound instincts for a film about a photographer, and Lee is certainly handsome. But taking Miller through the war years leaves too little time to watch her work, or to let a scene continue beyond the information it needs to convey.
Scarpetta (2026) exposes a different problem: consistency across episodes. Kuras shares the directing with David Gordon Green and Charlotte Brändström, so we cannot lay every awkward change at her door. The episodes do not look or move alike, while the red herrings and an AI chatbot keep pulling attention away from the actors. Jeff Russo and Perrine Virgile’s low strings provide continuity the pictures lack. Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis keep us watching; the direction gives them too little help.
We would still welcome another Kuras feature, preferably one less determined to cover every stage of its subject’s journey. Lee offers a reason to keep watching her, with Andy Samberg’s quietly effective performance beside Winslet another of its pleasures. Start there for the performances, and allow for the dutiful history around them.
Biography
Ellen Kuras is an American cinematographer and director. Born on 10 July 1959 in New Jersey, she studied anthropology and semiotics at Brown University and photography at the Rhode Island School of Design.
She began her career in documentaries before working as director of photography on narrative features including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Blow (2001) and Analyze That (2002). Kuras has directed episodes of series such as The Umbrella Academy (2019), Ozark (2017), Legion (2017) and The Terminal List (2022). Her feature directorial debut was the biographical drama Lee (2023), and she directed an episode of the series Scarpetta (2026).
Kuras directed and shot the documentary The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) (2008), which received an Academy Award nomination. She is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers.
