Anne Hathaway's Most Overlooked 2026 Performance Gets a Second Chance on Streaming
Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.
It's Anne Hathaway's world, and we're just living in it. After a few years of relative dormancy, Hathaway has returned to the center stage of movie culture to remind everyone why she's not only a major icon but also one of the best actors living today, and her filmography from this calendar year showcases her range across all genres and scales. The Oscar-winning actor has five credits to her name in 2026, including hits like The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey, as well as the brand-new sci-fi thriller The End of Oak Street, with Verity, a drama based on the bestselling book by Colleen Hoover, still on the way. The film that kicked off the Year of Hathaway, Mother Mary, was her smallest and most niche release, but it arguably features the actor's finest on-screen performance to date. David Lowery's psychological drama, available on HBO Max on August 21, is a beguiling and heart-wrenching portrait of fame and friendship.
Anne Hathaway is at Her Most Powerful in 'Mother Mary'
A24 has developed such a pedigree of prestige and acclaim that they are far from the little-engine-that-could indie studio that they started out as. In 2026, they have the cachet to attract a global brand name in Anne Hathaway, whose star power can be used to help a challenging arthouse film like Mother Mary get off the ground. Released in April 2026, the film stars Hathaway as the titular fictional pop star preparing for her comeback performance. Long-buried wounds resurface when Mary's estranged best friend and former costume designer, Sam Anselm, played by an equally brilliant Michaela Coel, reunites with her, forcing the musician to reckon with her life and regrets.
It was reported that, during the production of Mother Mary, Hathaway broke down in tears while filming an intense scene, and the raw human emotion is registered throughout the film's runtime. This headline suggested that audiences would be getting a sweeping, operatic epic, and not the quiet and methodical chamber drama that David Lowery ended up delivering to mixed results from critics and audiences. Either way, there's no denying the sheer magnitude of Hathaway's earth-shattering performance in Mother Mary, where she evokes a lifetime's worth of pain and yearning through subtle gestures and histrionic expressions.
While there is no clear one-to-one analog to Mother Mary, her lavish wardrobe and stage decor feel akin to Lady Gaga, a star whose bold conviction and uncompromising image have been her calling card for 20 years. The parallels are open to interpretation, as Hathaway's take on an uber-famous, emotionally burnt-out, and addled pop star taps into our ongoing discussions about celebrity culture and parasocial relationships between stars and fans. Even when she keeps her composure, Mary is on the brink of an emotional breakdown, and Hathaway seamlessly straddles this line. She makes Lowery's more ostentatious flourishes, such as Mary's interpretive dances and the stilted dialogue, feel wholly human. The character's coldness is not a turnoff, but rather, an invitation to explore her mindset.
'Mother Mary' is a Daring Study of Fame and Broken Friendships
David Lowery, best known for A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, directed his most audacious and unorthodox film to date with Mother Mary, a vision that unsurprisingly left some viewers perplexed. From its dialogue and pacing to its visual language, the film defies cinematic conventions. The narrative blurs the line between reality and fantasy, and its marketing suggested that the titular character's concert performances would be more of a focal point. Instead, Mother Mary is primarily concerned with the thorny relationship between Hathaway and Coel's characters. A story of love and hate, Mary and Sam share toxic traits of spite and envy, but they have a symbiotic partnership in their professional lives that's apparent. The bond taps into the unique dynamics between above-the-line and below-the-line artists, as Sam carries herself with a sense of alienation over feeling constantly overshadowed by Mary.
The film can feel like a slog in its middle stretch, perhaps intentionally so, but it springs to life in its sparse fantasy sequences, notably a spellbinding scene that depicts Mary's silhouette behind the concert stage. Lowery's formalist bravado comes alive even in the most stripped-down conversation scenes between Mary and Sam, and his sense of control is impressive in its own right. In terms of entertainment value, Mother Mary doesn't provide the charm and thrills of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey, but its thematic depth leaves you in a cloud of intrigue. At the very least, the film is a must-watch thanks to Hathaway, who is at the peak of her powers as a pop star you can't avert your eyes from.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.