- All the Days of My Life: On Elaine May’s “A New Leaf” (March 4, 2026)
Fifty-five years after its release, “A New Leaf” still stands alone. Its director, multihyphenate Elaine May, brought her experiences as a Method actor and an improvisational comedian to her filmmaking style, which would have been recognized for its singular brilliance had May been born a man. Instead, her insistence on tight scripts and loose, improvisational performances earned her a reputation for being “difficult.”
Elaine May’s directorial debut is not the first film about lovers plotting to murder one another: The concept drives Preston Sturges’ “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948), for example, as well as 1965’s “How to Murder Your Wife.” Still, May’s unique voice and style give “A New Leaf” unmatched poignancy and depth, which sneak into the film unnoticed while the audience is busy laughing at the characters and their screwball antics. As critic Richard Brody wrote in 2024, “the core of May’s work is the horror of romantic relationships as experienced by women”—a theme that’s treated here first as farce, then as something that’s harder to define.
Henry Graham (Walter Matthau) is the film’s main character, a heartless Manhattan playboy for whom money is an abstract concept. It never occurred to him that he could just run out of money, and he’s confused when his lawyer explains to him that his trust fund has been depleted. Selling his art collection—which, to be fair, does include some pretty striking modern pieces that would be worth millions in 2026—is out of the question. And so, in a murderous reversal of the “gold digger” stereotype, he sets out to find a wealthy single woman to marry, and then kill, in order to maintain his lifestyle. (Staying married to his unlucky bride is also out of the question.)
Henry could be a sinister figure, but May refuses to take him too seriously. A deadpan montage early in the film shows the shallow Henry bidding an absurd farewell to the trappings of his wealth, while his beloved Ferrari, which breaks down every time he drives it, symbolizes the futility of his existence. May lampoons Harry so thoroughly, in fact, that it comes as a surprise when he’s actually good at something besides telling a bound seam from a French one.
Henry has a great bullshit detector, as it turns out. The audience knows that he’s only helping his new wife Henrietta (May) with her finances so he can maximize his return after her death, but she doesn’t. She thinks he’s protecting her. The tension between what the audience knows and what the characters know is one of the film’s most cynical jokes: “Can you believe that this idiot thinks that she finally found someone who loves her for her?” May seems to be saying. “He’s actually trying to kill her!”
It’s tempting to read into the fact that May cast herself as the guileless Henrietta, a woman whose brilliance goes unnoticed because everyone’s focused on the crumbs on the front of her dress. (She’s the model for Tina Fey on “30 Rock,” down to the glasses.) May is notoriously reluctant to discuss her life—she refused to cooperate with the 2024 biography “Miss May Does Not Exist,” for example—which means that this speculation will have to remain just that. However, Henrietta’s naiveté has a note of tragedy to it that feels vulnerable, even personal, for the director.
Henrietta’s clumsiness and lack of refinement are both played for laughs in “A New Leaf.” Although she primarily made her living with words, May shows an incredible aptitude for physical performance in the role. Besides being hilarious, even the awkward way she holds her hands when she sits—May dangles her appendages in front of her, as if her wrists are broken—tells us a lot about her character. Henrietta is self-conscious and uncomfortable in her body, and only relaxes when she’s talking about her favorite subject: ferns.
Here is where “A New Leaf” begins to mature into something more nuanced. Initially framed as predator and victim, both Henry and Henrietta end up being more complicated than their comically exaggerated personalities suggest. Henrietta doesn’t care about material things, but she isn’t entirely selfless, either: Her dream of having a new plant species named after her is motivated by her desire for scientific immortality. Henry relates to the ego underlying this need, and briefly softens on his mark/bride. It’s another dark joke from May: A man only recognizes a woman as human when she acts like he does.
But what really changes their dynamic is when sweet, delusional Henrietta names the fern she discovered on their honeymoon after her new husband rather than herself. (He didn’t notice at the time; he was too busy reading a book called “Beginner’s Guide to Toxicology.”) Appropriately flattered, Henry begins to wonder if having a wife—this wife, specifically—might not be so bad after all. He’s not a terrible husband, either, if you can get past the whole “homicidal intentions” thing. The charred-black joke can be summed up into a single image: At its core, “A New Leaf” is a woman saying, “Yeah, he tried to kill me, but other than that he’s a nice guy.”
Based on the story “The Green Heart” by Jack Ritchie, May’s script for “A New Leaf” is full of sublime phrasing and absurd bon mots. (“Sooty blot” is a good one, as is “your erotic obsession with your carpet.”) As absurd as some of it can be, every element in the film is tightly controlled. On set, May insisted on perfection, and repeated scenes until they were right; but while such control freak tendencies were forgivable from, say, Stanley Kubrick, the same was not true for Elaine May.
“A New Leaf” went over budget and over schedule, and when May emerged after ten months in the editing room with a three-and-a-half-hour rough cut, Paramount’s Robert Evans decided to ignore May’s contract (which gave her final cut) and edited the movie down to 102 minutes. (Matthau, who turned out to be something of a Henry himself, took the studio’s side.) Outraged at having control over her film taken from her in such a public, humiliating way, May sued the studio to have her name removed from its credits; she lost, after a judge ruled that the final cut was still funny.
“A New Leaf” made money, and led to May helming another comedy classic, 1972’s “The Heartbreak Kid.” But for this self-taught genius, it was the beginning of a slow-motion heartbreak, as the drama over “A New Leaf” would repeat itself throughout May’s regrettably brief tenure as a director. Talked over, dismissed, and never given the benefit of the doubt, May struggled to maintain control over all four films she directed between 1971 and 1987; eventually, preemptive criticism of her film “Ishtar” would kill her directorial career. Now 93 years old, she never gives interviews, and appears in public only rarely. And why would she? The movie industry, a suitor she never really wanted in the first place, tried to kill her. She’s no hapless Henrietta, but every time someone discovers “A New Leaf,” her immortality is assured.
- Apple TV’s Tedious “The Hunt” Should Have Stayed on the Shelf (March 4, 2026)
Apple TV’s French drama “The Hunt” made headlines when it was pulled from the streamer’s schedule just days ahead of its initially scheduled December premiere due to plagiarism allegations. The series was accused of copying key elements from the 1973 novel Shoot by the late American author Douglas Fairbairn. Those claims clearly had some significant merit, given that the final product returns to our screens bearing a label on each episode that identifies it not only as adapted from Fairbairn’s book but also credits the subsequent feature film that bears its name. Unfortunately, this sort of lazy catchall vibe persists throughout the bulk of the six-part thriller, which is the worst sort of paint-by-numbers adaptation, so much so that the only remarkable thing about it is that nobody really noticed it was repeating the story beats of someone else’s work until mere days before it was supposed to air.
“The Hunt” is, to put it generously, not very good. Its pacing is painfully slow, its twists ploddingly telegraphed. Its characters are, for the most part, incredibly thinly sketched, with little more than a handful of identifiable traits meant to stand in for entire personalities. And, as an adaptation, it’s deeply uninteresting, shifting the setting of its story to France but not using that change to say anything particularly worthwhile about gun culture, toxic masculinity, or the escalating violence and unrest that’s becoming prevalent in small-town Europe. This is all doubly unfortunate because, on its own, the series’ premise is intriguingly dark and could be played out in any one of a dozen more interesting ways than what we end up getting.
The story begins with a group of friends on the sort of weekend hunting excursion you get the sense they take often. There’s group ringleader Franck (Benoît Magime), who definitely seems to own the most weaponry, as well as his sidekicks: Xavier (Damien Bonnard), Simon (Cédric Appietto), and Gilles (Manuel Guillot). Things suddenly take a dire turn when they’re inexplicably shot at by an unidentified second group of hunters deep within the woods. Simon is injured, and his friends scramble to return fire. One of the other unidentified hunters is hit, and the rest of the series is essentially about dealing with the fallout from this moment, and from Franck’s decision not to tell the police they may have killed a man.
As the group tries to settle back into their lives, they each find themselves growing increasingly paranoid as they’re forced to hide what happened from their families and worry over whether the other group is plotting revenge. Blackmail, raucous town meetings, arson, kidnapping, and even a dash of wild animal decapitation ensue. “The Hunt” does manage to generate some intriguing tension at times, leaning into the dread of its anonymous central threat and the fear that can drive desperate men to make terrible choices. Its gorgeously atmospheric setting feels almost hauntingly oppressive at times, and there are some fascinating threads of class tension simmering beneath the village’s seemingly picturesque streets.
But “The Hunt” struggles to make its central characters particularly interesting, or even fully three-dimensional. For all that Franck is ostensibly the series’s lead, we learn very little about who he is or what he wants. He’s cheating on his wife with another woman, though your guess is as good as mine when it comes to what he sees in her or what’s wrong with his marriage beyond the fact that Krystel (Mélanie Laurent) has a busy career. It’s an almost complete waste of Magimel, an award-winning performer who gets to do very little here besides display varying degrees of rage. And Franck’s core friends fare little better.
Simon, who fired the shot that struck the other hunter, visibly struggles with guilt over what he’s done, but beyond the fact that his ailing (and weed-loving) father lives with him and his wife, you’ll struggle to recall another single fact about him. Gilles is the kindest of the group, and though he seems to have both a drinking problem and an anxiety disorder, he at least means well. And then there’s Xavier, who steals packages from neighbors to sell for cash to a neighborhood meth dealer. None of these people is what you might call particularly likable or even all that sympathetic, and their characters are so flat that it’s difficult to get invested in what happens to them, even when presumably life or death stakes are involved.
Strangely, it’s the secondary plots that are its most compelling. One follows Franck’s wife, Krystel, as she attempts to help a homeless young runaway at a local shelter, who’s looking for a friend who’s gone missing. The other centers on Franck and Krystel’s daughter, Estelle (Sarah Pachoud), as she engages in some teenage rebellion by dating a local bad boy (Paul Beaurepaire) with uncomfortable family ties to some of the village’s more dangerous residents. Laurent exudes an effortless warmth and competence as Krystel, and her quiet determination is all the more affecting when weighed against her husband’s bluster. Pachoud, for her part, takes what ought to be a fairly thankless role and turns it into something much more interesting than it has any right to be. (It also doesn’t hurt that she and Beaurepaire have some excellent star-crossed style chemistry, either.)
To its credit, “The Hunt” does get more interesting once the ways its multiple subplots overlap are revealed, and it does manage to pull off some fairly impressive action sequences, particularly in its back half. And while its ending does provide more context and motivation for everything that’s happened than the original film and book this story is based on, it is also incredibly pat and muddies any sort of larger message the show might have been trying to convey.
It’s unfortunate when a series that sounds as good on paper as “The Hunt” does fails so spectacularly to live up to its own potential. A slog from start to finish and almost completely unwilling to take any sort of risks, it’s a thriller that really wants to be “The Most Dangerous Game,” but ultimately winds up remarkably safe.
All six episodes screened for review. Premieres March 4 on Apple TV.
- Female Filmmakers in Focus: Grace Glowicki on “Dead Lover” (March 4, 2026)
Part low-budget DIY theatre, part “Frankenstein,” part Kenneth Anger, and yet wholly its own creation, writer-director-star Grace Glowicki’s sophomore film, the expressionistic romantic horror comedy “Dead Lover,” is ready to teach you how to let go. The film stars Glowicki as a lonely, ostracized gravedigger who finally meets the love of her life, only to have their affair end abruptly after he drowns at sea. Heartbroken, the gravedigger attempts to resurrect her, um dead lover, through a series of scientific experiments involving lizards and a corpse. The result is an extremely silly, yet melancholic, examination of the lengths we go to hold on to our loved ones.
Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Glowicki moved to Toronto after graduating from McGill University. In Toronto, she began acting in indie films like Rebecca Addelman’s “Paper Year,” Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley’s “Strawberry Mansion,” Mary Dauterman’s “Booger,” and Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s “Honey Bunch.” In 2016, she won a special jury award at 2016 Sundance Film Festival for her performance in Ben Petrie’s “Her Friend Adam.” That same year she was named a rising star by the Toronto International Film Festival. Her debut feature as a director, “Tito,” which was shot in just seven days, premiered at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival where it won the Adam Yauch Hornblower Award for its unique vision. Glowicki’s singular performance in the film was later dubbed by The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody as “an instant classic of acting.”
In 2020, Glowicki received a grant from Telefilm to develop her second film, “Dead Lover.” A truly collaborative effort, she conceived of the film’s absurdist concept while brainstorming with a group of friends, then re-teamed with her creative and life partner Ben Petrie to write the film’s script. Petrie also appears in the film, along with Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow, with all three playing multiple roles. Shot over the course of sixteen days by acclaimed Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette, who filmed on 16mm using an Arri SR3 and Bolex, the comedy takes the premise “how far would you go to bring back the love of your life?” to its most absurd extremes. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival as part of the Midnight selection. Writing out of its world premiere, Robert Daniels called it “a loony, delirious dark romantic film with a handmade quality.” “Dead Lover” went on to screen at a myriad of festivals around the globe, including at SXSW, Rotterdam, and as part of the Midnight Madness program at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Glowicki over Zoom about chasing the high of making your friends laugh, the joys of DIY filmmaking, embracing mistakes, the comic genius of Lina Wertmüller, and how arts funding in Canada has helped a new wave of idiosyncratic filmmakers find their voice.
There was something wrong with my initial screener and it didn’t have the dialogue audio, just the music, so I thought at first you had made a silent film. It worked well, until I realized it wasn’t supposed to be a silent film. [laughs]
The composer, Meg Remy [aka U.S. Girls] actually did that as an exercise when she was writing the score. She watched the whole film silently, and she said the same thing to me. She was like, “It works as a silent film, bro.”
It absolutely does. I was following it. I was in it.
I love that.
You’re part of that wave of filmmakers who are all about getting a group of friends together and DIY making a film. I’d love to hear your ethos of creating from that place.
There’s something special about working with friends. Making movies is so hard, so it’s great if you can do it with people you love. My whole thing is I’m chasing this high you get from when you’re making something with someone and you’re just trying to make each other giggle. That, for me, that’s like a drug and I’m addicted to it. Like when you see actors break on “SNL”. Whatever that is, I’m chasing it. So, I like to pull together people who I think are really funny and really smart, and then just build a world together. That’s my favorite thing to do. I just try to keep doing that.
You’ve said this film came out of you riffing with a group of friends and landing on building a world around a gravedigger. What did you find so fascinating about a gravedigger?
I think it was because when I thought of gravediggers, I almost couldn’t think of a woman gravedigger. I thought that was so interesting that my imagination couldn’t even picture what that would look like. And that was a sign to myself that that was an interesting idea, to have a female gravedigger. Then, of course, the more you think about the thematics of a gravedigger, it’s like women can give birth, they have their periods, there’s all this blood, there’s all this dying that’s happening inside them cyclically every month, and so, we’re closer to death than men in some way. So it was interesting to think about a woman occupying this space.
Your film opens with a Mary Shelley quote, and the film is a bit of a riff on Frankenstein, but it’s not a pure adaptation. In the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of discussion about what is a pure adaptation, and whether you are allowed to claim the work as an inspiration if it’s too far removed. I would love to hear your thoughts on the influence Frankenstein had on this film, and how it came in, what you took, and what you left, etc.
For a while, I was embarrassed to admit that I’ve actually never read Frankenstein. But I was okay with that, because I was interested in the fact that everyone knows Frankenstein as a story and a concept; it is baked into pop culture, and I’ve been inundated since I was little with all these different interpretations of Frankenstein and receiving all this different messaging of what this story was. I thought that that was a cool vantage point from which to make a Frankenstein story; a Frankenstein riff from all these different tidbits that I’d soaked up just from being alive in this moment of time. So that was my approach.
The movie actually revealed itself to be a Frankenstein movie later in the process. I definitely didn’t set out to make a Frankenstein movie, but it came from this core character trait of somebody who, even in the face of death, can’t let something go, can’t let someone go. So it almost came from more of a “Re-Animator” place at first, but then it clicked into Frankenstein, which I think just goes to show you that that story has some pretty timeless themes in it that are still relevant today, and are relevant even if you haven’t read the source material.
I love what you said about being obsessed with something and just not being able to let it go. And this is the most extreme version of that. Your film is very comedic, but it has an undercurrent of melancholy to it that I found very moving, despite the silliness. Can you talk a bit about that melancholic throughline?
The movie comes from working through my own anxious attachment style, essentially. So the movie actually comes from a real place in my heart. I like to take little problems I’m working on and magnify them and exaggerate them, to really look at them. So of course, I’m not like the character of Gravedigger. I wouldn’t reanimate a dead loved one. But, I relate to her in that I have felt that feeling when you feel someone pulling away from you, and you want to grasp them, and you want to hold them, and you want to control them and keep them close to you, and you don’t want them to leave. That’s the emotional core of this movie. The moral of the movie is, if you love it, let it go. Of course, Gravedigger doesn’t know how to do that, so that’s why she has a tragic end.
To your point about it being relevant to what’s going on today. I actually just read an article about death bots.
What are those?
They are chat bots where you upload audio that you have of a loved one, or before you die you can upload it yourself for your loved ones, and then people can “talk” to their loved ones forever. I found that deeply disturbing.
That’s like a Cronenberg movie. It’s like “The Shrouds.”
I read that piece right after I watched your film, and I was like, I don’t think this ends well.
No, I don’t think so either.
Your film is really a four-person show with so many different people playing different characters. How did you develop the characters for each person? What was that process like?
It was so cool to watch people play multiple characters. It comes from my love of seeing comedy troops do that on SNL and Monty Python. There’s such joy in a single actor playing multiple different roles, or a small team performing a world of characters. It was very fun.
The rehearsal process really bonded us as a comedy troupe. We all played each of the different characters, so during the rehearsal process we weren’t attached to a specific character. So Ben [Petrie] would play Gravedigger, I would play Gravedigger, Leah [Doz] would play Lover, Ben would play Lover, and we would cycle through all the characters in effort to develop them as a team instead of as individuals. I think it broke what in a normal movie is a territorialism and an ego identification between an actor and a character; it allowed the world to be ours as a team. That was wonderful for getting basically four brains to inhabit a character and see what they saw through the eyes of that character. It was wonderful for development. Then, when we got closer to the shoot, I just asked the actors which characters they were gravitating towards the most. And sure enough, they all picked different characters. No one was competing for the same character. It just naturally fell into place.
The production design and makeup and costumes are so important to the creation of who these characters are and the world they inhabit. Can you talk a bit about collaborating with your artisans on that?
The production designer was Becca Morrin, who also did “Strawberry Mansion” as well. I had worked with her on that and saw her make these fantastic worlds sometimes just using painted cardboard or recycled milk jugs. Watching her take whatever material she had access to and turn them into these expressive DIY landscapes was amazing. So I knew working in this way, on “Dead Lover,” she would be perfect to create the world with so little. I really didn’t want to have any background on set. I wanted everything to fall into blackness, like it would in a black box theater. She totally ran with it and nailed the DIY theater aesthetic.
The cinematographer, Rhayne Vermette, is an extraordinarily talented woman. I had seen her film “St. Anne.” Some of her shots in that movie, and her use of color to light characters, and the way she used darkness. . . I just thought, “Oh, my God, this woman is just painting with light and darkness.” So when she agreed to do the movie, I knew the combination of her and Becca would totally elevate this idea I had for making a stripped back theater movie. They nailed it.
I think everyone who worked on the movie was pretty excited, because we could go so big and so expressive. Most of us in film are used to working in a realistic space, but I’m big on imperfections, too. So we kept saying continuity is for losers. You couldn’t make a mistake, in a way, because the mistakes were welcomed and the cracks and the veneers were welcomed.
Were there any lo-fi films you looked to as a reference, or were you just purely translating your experience in theatre to film?
It’s mostly my experience in theatre, but then retroactively, I would watch Kenneth Anger films and notice some similarities there, and, of course, Rhayne’s films. I think part of it is, as an actor, I struggle with continuity, and I struggle with being consistent. So it’s in some ways, a rebellion against the pressure I feel in other people’s films to maintain some kind of consistency, and then I can sell it as a conscious celebration of imperfections and cracks, but also performance itself.
I’m not terribly interested in trying to create a perfect illusion of realism. I don’t find that super interesting as an actor or a filmmaker. It’s why I like Nicolas Cage. I like when people are big and inconsistent. We’ve been reading Sam Shepard plays, and those characters often switch into each other and out of each other. There’s something so cool about the spontaneity of that that I prefer, I guess.
It feels like there’s this whole generation of thirty-something Canadians making very expressive, idiosyncratic cinema. I wonder if you feel as if you’re a group working in a class, or if you’re all independent, but somehow it’s coming together from an outsider perspective, like a class of filmmakers?
I don’t know why exactly it’s happening. I love Matthew [Rankin]’s work. He’s been really supportive of my work. I think Guy Maddin coming from Winnipeg, and both Rhayne and Matthew coming from Winnipeg, and me hiring these Winnipeg people to come make this movie. There’s something about the tradition around Winnipeg and film and Guy Maddin that I’m sure is part of it. But I also think it’s because the Canadian government is amazing at funding filmmakers to make these projects. I think there’s space for us to be a little more expressive, because we’re getting support from these arts councils and Telefilm to make these cultural art projects. I think that’s part of why these voices are able to emerge with so much artistic freedom. It’s a big testament to the government.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how the restrictions of low budget filmmaking affects your creative process.
The first film I made, “Tito,” I made in seven days. I kept wanting to make it in four days, but everyone said no, you need at least seven days. I still want to make a four day feature, because there’s just something so thrilling about putting yourself inside limitations. You’re trapped and you have to find your way out. What are the thoughts and the ideas and creativity that will come from those restrictions? It tantalizes me. When you can do absolutely anything, you just end up doing nothing at all.
Liking restrictions has been so helpful for me in the context of indie film. That first feature that I shot, I couldn’t get any money from anywhere. I had to cobble together, I think it was $12,000 from my filmmaker friends to shoot that movie. We shot it with just two people in a house. Being interested in working within restrictions has allowed me to continue as an indie filmmaker and to slowly climb my way up. Because, you do start with nothing, so that is the ultimate restriction. I always say I would just like to have rails. If I know what my rails are, then I’m good. If I feel like I don’t have rails as an actor or filmmaker, I tend to panic.
So my intention for “Dead Lover,” was that you can’t make a mistake, and if it’s fun, that’s what we have to follow. My restriction for this film was that I wanted to be collaborative and to have fun and to prove to myself that we could have a really good time making a movie, and that would be worth something. Also, of course having no background on the set and shooting on 16mm with very little money was also a restriction for me and the actors. Restriction was really baked into the ethos of this film.
Filming on 16mm means you can’t just shoot coverage and call it good. You have to be really intentional with your shots. Shooting on 16mm can sometimes seem like just an aesthetic choice, but I think here it was really a world building choice and an artistic choice that allows for precision, not necessarily perfection, but precision in your filmmaking.
We decided to work without a monitor too. So we were shooting the movie blind. We had to trust each other. That was another restriction. We had to just trust each other, trust our eyes on the day. I had to trust when Rhayne said she had something good framed and I didn’t have time to look at it. That restriction was so wonderful for throwing us back to a way of filmmaking that used to exist before monitors were invented, where people did just have to tacitly and physically feel things out, and it bonds the crew in an interesting way, and focuses everyone in an interesting way. I love stuff like that.
Were there any other women who make films who have either influenced you in the past, the present, whatever, or if there’s just some film directed by women that you really love and you would like to shout it out so people watch it?
The poster that hangs above my desk is the poster for Věra Chytilová’s “Daisies.”
The greatest.
I’m also obsessed with Lina Wertmüller. “Swept Away” is one of my favorite movies ever. She’s so, so, so amazing. So those two are coming to mind.
I love Lina Wertmüller. “Love and Anarchy” is my favorite of hers.
Those two Italian actors she always worked with, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, were so good. I really love those movies.
I can feel Lina Wertmüller in your comedy, actually, because everything she does is a little heightened, a little ridiculous.
Yeah, her characters are full fledged, like clowns.
That’s why I love asking that question, because, I wouldn’t immediately see it, but then you say it now I can see it. I have to rewatch “Dead Lover” and think about Lina Wertmüller.
I love that you see it. That’s a huge compliment.
Lina Wertmüller, I feel like, as a filmmaker was so influential for so long and has been a little bit forgotten now. I think because her films are harder to access. It heartens me to hear when people mention her films, because she’s one of the greatest.
Yeah, she’s amazing. She was the first woman to direct a film nominated for Best Picture, which is pretty amazing.
Her film “Seven Beauties” truly deserved it too. That film is intense.
It’s a wild movie. I just watched that movie.
Definitely one of those movies that the line that she walks between comedy and melancholy and horror is just sex. It’s a lot.
It really is. She’s amazing.
Do you have any parting thoughts you hope viewers will take from your film?
Honestly, if you love it, let it go.
“Dead Lover” will be released on March 20th, 2026.
- Across 50 Seasons, “Survivor” Reflects Evolving Views of American Women (March 4, 2026)
CBS’s “Survivor,” the iconic survival-themed social competition series, launched its 50th season this year into a very different world than the one in which it premiered. When its first season became a sensation in the summer of 2000, American culture was shot through with a particularly rancid strain of misogyny with which we are only now beginning to reckon. While we have always wrestled with sexism in this country, it is hard to describe to a young person today (who has grown up with feminist movements and voices as societally prominent) just how conspicuous and disgusting this misogyny was in the 2000s, and how disrespected attempts to counter it were.
“Survivor” has run continuously on CBS since 2000, airing two seasons every year (excepting a pandemic-induced break). It has stayed on the air alongside various social upheavals, and it has both reflected and produced examples of the developing societal concerns of its time. When that first season aired, it was promoted as a “social experiment”; how will sixteen ordinary Americans deal with a simulation of harsh survival conditions? While the pretense of the social experiment fell away as the series developed into a more explicitly gamified competition, it’s still worthwhile to look at “Survivor”as a product of American social conditions. The show is designed around a mechanic where competitors have regular opportunities to vote other players out of the show. As originally conceived, the player voted out would represent a “weak link,” someone hurting the ability of the others to continue “surviving.”
While this approach to vote-offs fell away as the show’s social gameplay developed (it eventually became more common to keep weak players around to use as pawns in alliances), women were still frequently made into early targets. A woman was the first boot in 31 out of the show’s first 49 seasons. In the early days, when casts featured more age diversity, older women in particular were frequently taken out as soon as possible; teams considered them easy targets to arrange consensus votes around. After a while, the show stopped casting older women altogether—it was simply a matter of course that they wouldn’t last very long. Older men are still cast from time to time, though. For male “Survivor” competitors, aging is shown to confer wisdom, experience, and toughness. For women on “Survivor,” getting older does you no good.
Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick. Photo: Gail Schulman/CBS ©2025 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Though “Survivor” is a reality show, it is more productive to think of its cast members in terms of how they are portrayed in a narrative sense. The producers select competitors with certain archetypes in mind and then edit them to become television characters; in other words, the show deliberately produces certain images of American women. So, what does the 21st-century American woman look like according to “Survivor?” Numerous character types have been observed by viewers and described by producer Mark Burnett: “Cheerleaders” and “Beauty Queens” cast primarily for their looks, though if these women get too strategic or socially manipulative, they’re instead portrayed as “Femme Fatales.” “Crazy Cat Ladies” are older and kookier. The “Team Mom” is supportive but passive. Athletic women are “Sporty.” There are many personality types here, but a consistent picture does emerge: “Survivor” women are portrayed positively when they lean into being social, nurturing, and friendly; they are portrayed negatively if they engage in manipulation or intense gameplay. There are male casting archetypes too, of course, but the show tends to lean into macho images: men who manipulate are Machiavellian geniuses; men who physically dominate are superheroes.
At first blush, “Survivor” might appear to be a surprisingly egalitarian competition. Twenty-eight seasons have been won by men and 21 by women, though those numbers were more lopsided prior to the “new era” begun in 2021. From the beginning, the show has had an equal number of male and female competitors, and in the early days this led to a more or less equal division of winners. Its first ten seasons were won by five women and five men, and there were three female winners in a row between seasons 6 and 8. Still, we find some interesting examples of bias in this period. Consider the show’s first two winners: Richard Hatch and Jerri Manthey. Both played games characterized by deceit and backstabbing, but while editors portrayed Hatch as a brilliant schemer, Manthey was portrayed as a man-eating villainess. She was the first “Survivor” veteran to speak out about the ways that the show used editing to reduce real people into stereotypes. When Manthey and Hatch returned for “Survivor All-Stars” in 2004, Manthey’s comments got her loudly booed at the live reunion show. Hatch, who had driven fellow competitor Susan Hawk to quit the season after he molested her during a challenge, received a comparatively warmer reception.
Jenna Lewis-Dougherty and Rick Devens. Photo: Gail Schulman/CBS ©2025 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
For the middle seasons of the show, men began to win significantly more often than women; this period coincided with an increased focus on “advantage” items, which players could use to alter gameplay in powerful ways. These advantages rewarded more aggressive play, which ran counter to the tendency of female players to orient their approaches around social connection. In season 19, “Samoa,” the producers had what seemed to be their ideal player in Russell Hantz. He was brash, bold, and totally ruthless, controlling the entire cast like a puppet master. He played the kind of “Survivor” game that the show likes to promote: highly strategic and advantage-focused. In an unprecedented move, they cast Hantz to play again on the very next season, putting him back on the island before he even knew if he’d won “Samoa.” In fact, “Samoa” was won by Natalie White, whom Hantz had allied with early on in the hopes of using her as an easy final opponent. But Hantz alienated his fellow players with his hostile play and confrontational personality, while White flew under the radar and stayed on good terms with everyone. Not knowing he had lost “Samoa,” Hantz tried the same strategy on the next season, “Heroes vs. Villains,” with Sandra Diaz-Twine. It led to the same result, with Diaz-Twine becoming the first person to win “Survivor” twice. The show may have taken pains to positively portray more “masculine” playstyles, but Hantz’s back-to-back losses demonstrated an increasing distaste for them among players.
This dynamic came to a head in the late 2010s. In one particularly egregious example, Cirie Fields (considered the best “Survivor” player to never win the game) was voted off of season 34 because every other player had an advantage that they could use to keep themselves immune, meaning Fields was the only person it was possible to vote for. In season 39, contestant Dan Spilo received constant complaints from female players about him touching them inappropriately. Producers took little action besides telling him to stop, and while an agreement was made among the remaining women to vote Spilo out at the first opportunity, a few of them decided to use the situation as a gameplay advantage and voted out his primary accuser, Kellee Kim, instead. Spilo was later removed from the show after sexually harassing one of the producers. In season 40, the landmark all-winners “Winners at War,” Sarah Lacina lamented to host Jeff Probst that he and the show at large celebrated men for playing aggressively while framing women who played the same way in much more negative terms. It was clear that the culture of the show needed to change, and the year-long production break forced by Covid gave it an opportunity to do just that.
Dee Valladares. Dee is previously the winner of Season 45. Photo: Scott Duncan/CBS ©2025 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This “new era,” which began alongside MeToo and other culturally progressive shifts, is extremely conscious of the history of “Survivor.” The response to the various controversies and debacles of the last decade has been to orient the show around a pop-feminist perspective. The show’s editors began to craft narratives around “emotional journeys” rather than gameplay aggression. The competitors cast on the show started having milder personalities—it became common for vote-offs to end in hugs instead of curses. In season 41, Probst openly asked the cast if they felt the catchphrase he had always used to bring people into challenges (“Come on in, guys”) was exclusionary; he decided to start saying “come on in” instead. This kinder, sanded-down version of “Survivor” has led to some fan backlash from people who miss the days of intense drama and clashing personalities.
Modern “Survivor” wants to portray an America where cooperation is paramount and difference is invisible, yet America today is more divided, angry, and volatile than when the show began. The show is self-aware enough about its past to make an effort to no longer passively reflect society, instead endeavoring to produce more positive images of it. But it has felt, in recent years, as though the show’s response to Sarah Lacina’s critique in “Winners at War” has been to tone down on aggression and manipulation across the board, rather than changing how the show depicted that kind of gameplay from women. The idea that a more gender-inclusive and fair-minded “Survivor” must necessarily feature less drama and conflict is no less patronizing than the show’s original pigeonholing of women as nurturers or seductresses. American society has made room for more complex and nuanced ideas of what women can be. It’s past time “Survivor” did the same.
- How “The Testament of Ann Lee” Subverts Cinema’s Lineage of Cult Leaders (March 4, 2026)
Ever since Niall MacGinnis ordered his devil worshippers—among them malevolent ghouls and spirits—to do his bidding in 1957’s “Night of the Demon,” cinema has had its fair share of egotistical male cult leaders. From Sidney Blackmer in the satanic double act of “Rosemary’s Baby” and Orson Welles’ bespectacled coven leader in “Necromancy” to a literally bloodthirsty Mola Ram in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” onscreen it is usually men who keep dubious sects in their thrall with their sinister charisma. In the likes of “To the Devil a Daughter” and “The Wicker Man” (in which Christopher Lee is repeatedly typecast as a cult leader), men play puppet master, manipulating others to gradually push them towards their own devious ends.
But in Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee,” Amanda Seyfried plays one of the first female cult leaders to arrive on the big screen in decades. In this exultant, avant-garde musical, Seyfried plays the titular 18th century missionary, born in poverty in Manchester and raised without education, illiterate. An incendiary and, in many ways, revolutionary figure, Lee envisioned herself as the female Messiah prophesied by the Quakers and went on to establish her own group, the Shakers. A kind of precursor to transcendentalism in its idealistic, egalitarian approach, the sect is anchored by the idea that letting loose through dance absolves sin. She preached gender and racial equality, as well as communal living rooted in fairness for her followers, but her sect had one contentious founding principle: celibacy.
Stacy Martin and Amanda Seyfried in THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
Through this proto-feminist figure, Fastvold raises thorny questions that typical films about cults do not dare to ask: If a leader emerged with seemingly progressive principles, the appeal of which are clear, at what point would one draw the line over the wild extremity of their beliefs and outlandish ways of living? The sheer seductiveness of Ann’s beliefs and personality are made clear by the biased perspective through which Fastvold chooses to tell her story. When Ann is first introduced, it is by one of her most impassioned followers, Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie), and it’s through this partial prism that we are inducted into Ann’s weird and fantastical world.
Unlike features about male cult leaders such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” Fastvold’s biopic is refreshingly and intriguingly nonjudgmental. Through Mary’s gaze, we see a matriarch—appropriately dubbed “Mother”—who is inspirational not only for her strength in the face of persecution and adherence to her beliefs but also for her commitment to nurturing her community of acolytes. The fact that “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a musical is no accident: rapt, euphoric musical numbers help to lure us into Ann’s universe. Intoxicating and exhilarating in equal measure, for the viewer, it is hard not to get swept along by Ann’s irresistible creed—especially when it’s packaged with such earworms.
Cracks in the foundations appear much more subtly. Despite being in her close-knit inner circle, when Ann’s niece Nancy (Viola Prettejohn) caves to her sexual desire, she is instantly, brutally excommunicated from the Shakers. Another significant dissenter emerges in the form of Ann’s husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), who grows increasingly frustrated with Ann’s chastity and is eventually compelled to challenge Ann’s status as Messiah. Fastvold also makes the decision—distinct from historical evidence—that Ann’s brother, William (Lewis Pullman), is gay, unravelling further questions about repressed sexuality and desire.
Amanda Seyfried in THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” gestures towards a long and less-discussed legacy of cult leaders on film. The very first cult leader onscreen was actually a woman in “The Seventh Victim,” Esther Redi (Mary Newton), the figurehead of the Palladists, a murderous cult operating under the guise of a cosmetics company. The rare examples which followed were the flower-crown-wearing Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) in “The Blood on Satan’s Claw” and more recently the escaped felon (from the future) Maggie (Brit Marling) in “Sound of My Voice.” These female cult leaders are rarely allowed the screentime that their male counterparts have or are cast as seductresses and manipulators rather than charismatic figures. This is despite many real-life cult leaders being non-male: Eleanor Bone, dubbed “matriarch of British witchcraft”; and Diane Hegarty, an actor and sorcerer who cofounded the Church of Satan with her partner Anton LaVey in 1966.
By offering an alternative narrative to these male portrayals—which is separate from deep-seated ideas about toxic masculinity and power—Fastvold demonstrates that there are no obvious answers to questions about charisma, cult of personality, and faith. These ideas are especially resonant in an era of online extremism and polarization. With its theatrical maritime sequences and euphoric dancing, “The Testament of Ann Lee” feels at times literally unmooring. Ann’s divine vision is presented entirely as if real, her transformation into another, holier being rendered impeccably onscreen. And, the film seems to ask, who’s to say it’s not? Yet an end credit title card undercuts Lee’s mission: Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their core belief, only two followers remain in the Shaker tradition today. Rather than dictating to viewers how they should feel about Ann Lee, Fastvold allows us to make up our own minds.
