Arts

Mother Mary
Director: David Lowery
A24, Topic Studios, Access Entertainment
In Theaters: 04.24.2026

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” or whatever the fuck those silly little Catholics say. With David Lowery’s ninth feature, our dear Mother Mary is anything but full of grace. Though she is full of something … g-g-g-GHOSTS! 

Mother Mary follows a distraught pop star (take a wild guess at her name), played by the always lovely Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada), who dramatically ends up on the doorstep of her ex-best friend and costume designer, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel, Chewing Gum, Black Mirror). She confesses to Sam, after barging her way into her secluded design studio, that she needs a dress that feels like “her.” This is something she feels her current team of designers can’t do and is very important, as she’s performing a new unreleased song to celebrate her comeback. During the creation of the gown, the two women reminisce and catch up, all in the same haunted breath. During their heart-to-heart (pun intended), they both realize that at some point since their separation, they each have been taking turns experiencing a haunting by the red, shapeless form of a (what they both determine is at least female) “ghost.” 

Now, not to sound like a broken record, kids, but what is my favorite saying? That’s right, “there are no perfect movies,” and Mother Mary is an example of a very complicated and imperfectly okay movie. Lowery’s writing is, at times, far too abstract or obtuse, which can lead to quite a bit of confusion for about 100 of the film’s 112-minute runtime. Before it’s clarified, the relationship between the two female leads is hard to decipher. Are they best friends, former lesbian lovers or a secret, worse, third option? Does this red ghost actually have anything to do with unresolved feelings these women still have for each other, or is it just aesthetic? 

There are also interesting “visions” Sam gets when talking things through with Mother Mary that feel somewhat like they tangle the film’s overall seam. It also lacks a lot of raw edges you would normally see when two women discuss a “friendship break-up.” Mary Mother also has yet to break the curse of the inaccurate on-screen popstar portrayal. I’m not sure why, but for some reason, Hollywood cannot get the feel of a popstar just quite right on screen. Mother Mary is supposed to be Lady Gaga, yet it feels like her on-stage scenes are what dads imagined watching Hannah Montana must’ve looked and felt like to their daughters. This is something that seems unfathomable when you have Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX to help write the soundtrack. 

That being said, once the ending hits you in the face and you finally get the full picture that Lowery is painting, the film saves itself. Lowery does something interesting and unique when it comes to the haunting genre of horror, as his characters are not haunted by ghouls and goblins but by emotional moments or memories in time. This is something that, when done right, is the epitome of beauty and is frankly more terrifying than any jumpscare by a James Wan demon. What’s more haunting than the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens of an intense connection with another human being, romantic or platonic? What’s more punishing than being the one who committed the sin that severed your red thread connection? Lowery also puts the infamous Bechdel Test to shame, as there is not a single male character with dialogue for the entirety of the film.

Do I love what Lowery is trying to do here? Yes. Does he stumble and fumble along the way? Absolutely. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t see Mother Mary, but also if you miss it … you’re not missing much. —Yonni Uribe

Read more film reviews by Yonni Uribe:
Wasatch Mountain Film Festival Review: Protecting Our Playground
Film Review: The Drama

3.5/5 stars

The American filmmaker started his career with 1994’s Little Odessa, starring Tim Roth as a Russian-Jewish hitman operating in the Brighton Beach area of New York. His next two films, The Yards (2000) and We Own the Night (2007), kept him ensconced in the world of low-life criminals.

Paper Tiger also casts the Russian mob as the antagonists. Set in 1986 in Queens, New York, it stars Miles Teller and Adam Driver as the Pearl brothers, Irwin and Gary.

Irwin (Teller), an engineer, is married to Hester (Scarlett Johansson) and has two teenage sons: Scott (Gavin Goudey), who is about to turn 18, and the younger Ben (Roman Engel), who is diligently studying for his exams.

Gary (Driver), a former policeman who still has connections on the force, encourages Irwin to team up and create an environmental clean-up business involving the filthy Gowanus Canal.

For Richard Avedon, as with most significant artists, work and life were inseparable. When the photographer died in 2004, at 81, he was on the road, mid-project — “with his boots on,” in the words of Lauren Hutton, one of the many beautiful people he helped to immortalize over a 60-year career. Hutton and the two dozen or so other interviewees in Ron Howard’s admiring documentary make it clear how much affection the New York native inspired while reinventing fashion photography and putting his iconoclastic stamp on fine-art portraiture.

The profile Avedon paints is that of a relentless seeker and high-flying achiever, and a deliciously unapologetic contrarian. How can you not adore an image-maker who says, “Beautiful lighting I always find offensive,” and, regarding little kids as potential photographic subjects: “I find them intensely boring.” Avedon’s interest in the grown-up human face, in what it conceals and reveals, was his lifelong project, one that he pursued within circles of rarefied fame, on the backroads of the American West, and in a poignant late-in-life connection with his father.

As confrontational as his images could be, the camera was Avedon’s way of experiencing the world, a way of seeking truth through invention. Howard, whose previous doc subjects include Jim Henson and Luciano Pavarotti, and whose fiction movies are designed more to engage rather than to confront, seems particularly inspired here by Avedon’s auteur approach to still photography — it was a narrative impulse, not a documentary one, that shaped his vision, a drive to create moments and mise-en-scènes for the camera.

Avedon built his career at magazines in an era when magazines mattered. He was only 21 when he joined Harper’s Bazaar, where he stayed for 20 years, leaving to follow fashion editor Diana Vreeland to Vogue, where he stayed even longer. And when Tina Brown took the helm at The New Yorker and overturned its age-old no-photos policy, she hired Avedon as its first staff photographer.

When Harper’s sent him to Paris in 1947 with an edict to summon some of the battered capital’s prewar glamour, he turned to movies for inspiration and conjured visions of romantic fantasy amid the ruins. It was his first significant assignment, and a turning point for fashion photography. The doc emphasizes how, at a Dior show, the images he captured of the designer’s voluminous skirts mid-twirl expressed an ecstatic moment after years of wartime rationing. “People were weeping,” recalls Avedon, a vivid presence in the doc thanks to a strong selection of archival material.

The kinetic energy of those shots would become a defining element of his approach. Injecting movement and a theatrical edge into fashion photography, he lifted it out of the era of posed mannequins. To get models into the spirit of his concepts, he often leapt and danced alongside them. It’s no wonder that in Funny Face, the romantic musical loosely inspired by his career and first marriage, Fred Astaire played the photographer. Eventually Avedon shifted to a large-format camera, an 8×10, that allowed him to interact with his subjects directly, rather than through a viewfinder. There would be more scripted and carefully choreographed moments in his TV spots for Calvin Klein jeans and Obsession, collaborations with the writer Doon Arbus (daughter of Diane and Allan Arbus) that took chances (and which, for some viewers, are inseparable from memorable spoofs on SNL).

Fashion and advertising were mainstays, but he also became a notable portraitist. Positioning his subjects against a plain white background, he removed flattery from the equation. It was an artist-subject relationship in which he held all the power, and he didn’t pretend otherwise; on that point, Brown offers a trenchant anecdote. Remarkably, even though his refusal to sugarcoat was well established — not least by his notorious photo of the Daughters of the American Revolution — an Avedon portrait carried such cachet that establishment figures including the Reagans, Henry Kissinger and George H.W. Bush all submitted themselves to his crosshairs.

The film suggests that a moral imperative was as essential to Avedon’s work as his unconventional aesthetic vocabulary. He threatened to sever his contract with Harper’s when the magazine didn’t want to publish his photos of China Machado, and he prevailed: In 1959, she became the first model of color to appear in the editorial pages of a major American fashion magazine. Howard looks beyond the catwalks and salons to Avedon’s portraits of wartime Saigon, Civil Rights leaders and patients at Bellevue, many of those images collected in Nothing Personal, the book he did with James Baldwin, a friend from high school. A superb clip from a D.A. Pennebaker short of the book launch encapsulates the painfully awkward disconnect between the artist and the corporate media contingent. Most surprising, though, is how hard Avedon took it when the book was lambasted by critics. A later book, In the American West, would also meet harsh criticism; Avedon was, in the eyes of some, a condescending elitist.

Howard’s film is a celebration of a complicated man. It acknowledges Avedon’s naysayers, as well as his struggles and doubts, but this is very much an official story, made in association with the Richard Avedon Foundation, and steering clear of the disputed 2017 biography by Avedon’s business partner. The commentary, whether from models (Hutton, Isabella Rossellini, Twiggy Lawson, Penelope Tree, Beverly Johnson) or writers (Adam Gopnik, John Lahr, Hilton Als) or Avedon’s son, John, can be gushing, but it’s always perceptive.

The connection he sought with his subjects wasn’t about star worship but the instant when the ego lets down its guard, yet at the same time he was more interested in what he called “the marriage of the imagination and the reality” than straight documentation. Without putting too fine a point on it, Avedon links those twinned yet seemingly contradictory impulses to certain formative experiences. There was the devastation of extreme mental illness for Avedon’s sister and his second wife. There was the pretense of happiness in his childhood home in Depression-era New York (the city is captured in terrifically evocative clips). He recalls, discerning and exasperated, the staged domestic harmony — “the borrowed dogs!” — in family photos.

Avedon doesn’t aim to unsettle, like Avedon himself did, but neither does it tie things up neatly. There’s nothing simple or reductive about the emotional throughlines the documentary traces. It embraces the complexities of a man who turned artifice into a kind of superpower, whether he was dreaming up scenarios for fashion spreads or confronting an America as far removed from haute couture Manhattan as you could get.