A pop star's need for a new dress sets in motion David Lowery's "Mother Mary," a fitfully spellbinding chamber drama that grows more operatic with every stitch. What might be a fairly routine affair — some performers change outfits nearly every song — is in Lowery's latest taken to beguiling extremes when the pop star Mother Mary ( Anne Hathaway ) turns up wet and forlorn at the studio of her former fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Their reunion, after more than a decade of estrangement, reopens old wounds, stirs reinvention and spawns a ghost story sewn together, you could say, by phantom threads. It's best at its least adorned, when Lowery leaves it to Hathaway and Coel, in a grand, shadowy workroom to work through their past. As the movie grows more abstract, it loses momentum. But an impassioned melodrama and a curiously sincere belief in the transformative power of pop music wrap "Mother Mary" in a gothic garb all its own. It is, at the least, the first movie that could be called an earnest attempt to meld Taylor Swift's Eras Tour with "A Christmas Carol." Yet Lowery, whose previous films include " A Ghost Story, " " The Green Knight " and "Ain't Them Bodies Saints," took real inspiration from Swift in fashioning Mother Mary, an arena-playing star whose faithful following has spiritual dimensions made explicit by her trademark halo. (The devil may wear Prada but Mother Mary doesn't.) Her songs in the film — written by Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff, and FKA twigs, who also co-stars — also have real pop bona fides. In the movie's heightened opening, Sam senses her impending approach instinctively. "I could tell she was coming from a thousand miles away," she narrates. When she does turn up, Sam is offish and reluctant but too curious... Read More