Kate Winslet's directorial debut is a weepy flick drowning in sentimentality, says BRIAN VINER

Goodbye June (15, 114 mins)

Verdict: Patchy family drama

Rating:

Eleanor The Great (12A, 98 mins)

Verdict: Glibly sentimental 

Rating:

By a cosmic coincidence, or whatever you call coincidences when stars are involved, the directing debuts of both Kate Winslet and Scarlett Johansson land in cinemas this week, each with a woman's name in the title. 

And from me at least, Goodbye June and Eleanor The Great elicited much the same response: watchable but flawed. Ultimately, both films drown in sentimentality.

Goodbye June is a weepie, set at Christmas, about a family coming to terms with the impending death of their elderly mother.

At last week's world premiere, Winslet took the stage with the screenwriter, Joe Anders, who happens to be her son and whose father is the acclaimed director Sam Mendes.

Anders seemed like a nice young man, not at all brash, and raised a laugh when he explained how their mother-son relationship turned into a director-writer relationship.

Nonetheless, he's only 21. He might one day become a garlanded writer and I hope he does. 

But it's not being catty to suggest that this script, created for a screenwriting course until his mum read and loved it, reached the screen thanks less to his talent than his stellar connections. 

Reached it, moreover, with a cast including not just Winslet herself, but also Dame Helen Mirren, Timothy Spall, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette and Johnny Flynn.

The few crass and clunky lines of dialogue might have been swerved by a more mature writer, but they don't stop it being a creditable effort by a fellow so young, who very knowingly tackles grief, sibling dynamics and general family dysfunction head on. But is it a film you should pay to see?

Winslet plays high-achieving Julia, the sister who gets things done despite juggling the needs of a young family, including a child with Down's Syndrome. 

Riseborough is the younger Molly, chippy and truculent, with contrasting ideas about child-rearing. Then there's Helen (Collette), the hippy-dippy sister who brings 'healing crystals' to the Cheltenham hospital bedside of June, their dying mother.

And that mother is, of course, the mighty Mirren; believable as ever, even as a grandma in the final stages of cancer.

Fundamentally, this is a film about the women in a family and how they relate to each other. 

The male characters are not constructed as carefully, nor acted as well, which I realise amounts almost to blasphemy in the case of Spall, who plays June's scatterbrained, neglectful, possibly dementia-stricken husband Bernie.

Spall is terrific in nearly everything he does. But here he lays it on so thick that if it were butter, you'd gag on it. 

And Flynn as the sisters' nervy brother Connor overdoes it too, by about 30 per cent, while Stephen Merchant as Molly's inadequate husband is just a caricature of a West Country idiot.

There are compensations. It's a treat to see Winslet and Mirren acting together. And some lines made me laugh, although the director and writer, I think, would prefer us to cry.

Still, let's show them some seasonal generosity. It's kind of them to invite us to wallow with them in their film's schmaltz, and to believe in a world – or more precisely, in a Cheltenham – in which it snows with total reliability every Christmas Day.

There are further lashings of mawkishness in Eleanor The Great, in which June Squibb plays Jewish grandmother Eleanor Morgenstein. She lives in Florida with her best friend, Bessie, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor played by the Israeli actress Rita Zohar (who escaped the Nazis in real life).

When Bessie dies, Eleanor moves to New York to live with her uptight daughter (Jessica Hecht) and grandson (Will Price). 

One day, at a Jewish community centre, she finds herself pretending that Bessie's story is hers. 

The lie grows, spinning out of control when Eleanor is befriended by a young journalism student, Nina (sweetly played by promising British actress Erin Kellyman).

Grieving for her own mother, Nina cleaves to Eleanor and introduces her to her father, Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a TV presenter, who recognises a powerful human-interest story when this sparky nonagenarian decides to have a bat mitzvah, a coming-of-age ritual. 

This is all very capably acted, but in the end the story is perturbingly glib in the way it addresses such weighty themes – above all, Holocaust survivor imposture, but also the headaches that come with caring for aged parents, and bereavement, too. There is one notably saccharine scene when Roger pours his heart out on live TV.

The film is further undermined by the fact that Eleanor is, well, not very nice. We are meant to see her as a spirited old biddy who sequesters Bessie's story to keep her beloved friend's memory alive. But in truth, her motives don't seem that pure.

Of course, we should cherish Squibb, who's just turned 96. It's remarkable at her prodigious age that she can inhabit a role with such commitment. But that doesn't give either Johansson's debut movie – or Squibb's character – a free pass.