All 5 Anne Hathaway Movie Performances From 2026, Ranked

Universal Pictures

In 2014, we hit the zenith of the so-called "McConnaissance," a re-evaluation and return to form for Matthew McConaughey that won him an Oscar and rave reviews for his work on the first season of "True Detective." In 2024, Josh Hartnett got a well-deserved critical reappraisal thanks to his work the previous year in "Oppenheimer" and then his deliciously deranged M. Night Shyamalan thriller "Trap." Now, we're in the thick of 2026, and it is, without contest, the year of Anne Hathaway.

Hathaway, who rose to prominence in teen fare like "The Princess Diaries," made her name as a dramatic actress in fare like "Brokeback Mountain" and commercial films like "The Devil Wears Prada," and earned an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her turn as Fantine in Tom Hooper's otherwise miserable big-screen adaptation of "Les Misérables." These days, she's a bonafide A-lister and a household name, and in 2026, she appears in five very different movies. Between the long-awaited sequel "The Devil Wears Prada 2," Christopher Nolan's masterful adaptation of "The Odyssey," the latest Colleen Hoover movie in the form of "Verity," the audacious dinosaur-centric thriller "The End of Oak Street," and David Lowery's bizarre and beautiful two-hander "Mother Mary," Hathaway has truly had quite an impressive year. So how do her performances stack up?

Let me be abundantly clear: Even in bad movies, Hathaway is reliably good. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Hathaway has confirmed, this year, that she's one of our finest performers by a mile. Still, some of her performances this year are better than the others, and that's where I come in. Here are all of Hathaway's 2026 film performances, ranked.

20th Century Studios

When I first learned that "The Devil Wears Prada" was getting a sequel 20 years later and that original stars Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, Emily Blunt, and Meryl Streep were returning for original director David Frankel and original screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, I was cautiously optimistic. I love the first film, I think Hathaway is great in it as Andrea "Andy" Sachs, colleague to Emily Charlton (Blunt) and Nigel Kipling (Tucci) and rookie assistant to Runway Magazine editrix Miranda Priestly (Streep). With that creative team returning, I got my hopes up a little bit. Sadly, those hopes ended up dashed when I actually sat down and watched "The Devil Wears Prada 2," which felt like a poor imitation of the original ... and easily features Hathaway's worst 2026 performance.

I said earlier that Hathaway is reliably good in all of her roles. Let me amend that, because it's sadly not the case in "The Devil Wears Prada 2," where we reunite with Andy 20 years after her time at Runway as she tries to navigate the dispiriting world of modern journalism and ends up back at the fashion magazine as its features editor. Hathaway performs basically every scene as if she's just ingested six to eight cups of coffee, peppy and wild to a degree that I found borderline alarming — especially because Andy is so wry and funny in the first film. Unfortunately for Hathaway, she's given middling material to work with and just zips her way through it without much thought ... and you can tell. (Besides, if there's a standout here, it's Blunt, not Hathaway.) Not only is "The Devil Wears Prada 2" just not a very good movie, but sadly, Hathaway isn't very good in it.

Amazon MGM Studios

Before I get into Anne Hathaway's performance as the titular role in the Colleen Hoover adaptation "Verity," let me get something out of the way: "Verity" is a really bad movie. In some ways, I wonder if one can even legally call it a "movie" in that the pacing is abhorrent, the narrative is a disaster, and the ending, without spoiling it, can only be described as an enormous, non-committal shrug. Here's the gist: Dakota Johnson plays low-profile writer Lowen Ashleigh (Hoover loves a dumb name), who's enlisted by the handsome and mysterious Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) to move into his enormous and remote home and help his wife, the massively successful thriller writer Verity Crawford (Hathaway), finish her series. As Lowen discovers in pretty quick order, the Crawford house is luxurious but troubled and weird; Jeremy is obviously attracted to Lowen, and Verity herself is in a catatonic state, which we're told is the result of a boating accident and a subsequent car accident.

"Verity" is stupid, but I have to commend Hathaway for giving this movie 150% of her commitment. We see her character mostly through diary entries of sorts as Lowen reads a manuscript of the author's apparent autobiography that she finds hidden in Verity's office, and thankfully, Hathaway performs those flashbacks (sort of like Rosamund Pike's Amy Elliott Dunne does in the vastly superior thriller "Gone Girl"). In these potentially falsified flashbacks, Hathaway is deliciously cruel, evil, and devious, sneering her way through scenes alongside Hartnett and showing off her impeccable timing. Hathaway deserves a hell of a lot better than "Verity," but at least she clearly had fun with it.

Universal Pictures

It was admittedly hard for me to not put "The Odyssey" in first place on this list of Anne Hathaway's best 2026 film performances, but at the end of the day, Hathaway's role is as a supporting player, and this movie belongs to her on-screen husband Matt Damon as the headstrong and arrogant warrior Odysseus. Still, in Christopher Nolan's blockbuster adaptation of the ancient Greek poem attributed to Homer, Hathaway still manages to shine as Penelope, wife of Odysseus and mother of Telemachus (Tom Holland) who's stuck ruling Ithaca through back channels while her husband, the king, remains lost at sea after winning the Trojan War with that pretty famous horse trick.

We don't see enough of Hathaway for my liking in "The Odyssey," but whenever she's on-screen, she's fantastic as she fends off odious, unctuous Ithacan suitors like Antinous (Robert Pattinson), welcoming beggars into her home as her husband would wish, or endlessly working on a shroud for her father only to undo all of her progress each night (due to the fact that once the shroud is finished, she must remarry). Still, she makes a meal out of every single moment; there's a moment between Penelope and Telemachus where Hathaway summons such pure, unfiltered rage that I actually gasped during my first viewing, and in the film's genuinely sensational third act, her manipulation of the suitors and reclamation of her beloved husband is as gripping as it is emotional. Hathaway should get an Oscar nomination somewhere and somehow for her (mostly) excellent work in 2026, and even though she arguably has two better performances, I'm holding out hope that she'll nab a supporting actress nod for "The Odyssey."

Warner Bros.

It's genuinely cool that anybody at Warner Bros. let David Robert Mitchell, the man behind "It Follows," make something as genuinely weird, ambitious, and truly fun as "The End of Oak Street" — and it's even cooler that someone as good as Anne Hathaway got to star in it. Mitchell's ode to Spielbergian adventure — which, of course, is set in the 1980s — focuses on the Platt family, made up of dad Greg (Ewan McGregor), daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), son Brian (Christian Convery), and mom Denise (Hathaway), the last of whom harbors a secret ambition to become a novelist and spends her time feeling dissatisfied in her marriage and knocking out a secret manuscript in the basement of the Platt's suburban home on Oak Street. After a strange storm turns the Platt's neighborhood into a prehistoric playground full of very hungry dinosaurs, Denise adapts as only a protective mother could, snatching up a shotgun and taking out dinosaurs to protect her kids (and later, Jordan Alexa Davis's Jeannette, whose whole family is killed by a pack of bloodthirsty dinos).

Hathaway has certainly dabbled in action thrillers before — she played Catwoman in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises," for god's sake — but this one puts her front and center, giving her the most agency in the movie as she figures out a way to save her family and escape the new (well, technically old) horrors of Oak Street. I'm just saying, watching Hathaway absolutely merc hordes of dinosaurs with a shotgun absolutely rocks, but thanks to her talent, she manages to sell every beat of this sometimes absurd and absolutely heightened film.

A24

As it happens, Anne Hathaway's best performance of 2026 is in her smallest-profile movie — so let me encourage you, if you haven't already, to sit down and experience the wonder that is "Mother Mary." Noted weirdo (complimentary) director David Lowery, who also helmed "The Green Knight," "A Ghost Story," and "The Old Man & the Gun," wrote and directed Hathaway's first 2026 release, which casts her as the titular Mary, a pop star trying to return to form after a dramatic fall on-stage left fans concerned and scared for her well-being. After melting down during a costume fitting, Mary seeks counsel and help from her former friend, former lover, and fashion designer Sam Anselm (the wonderful Michaela Coel), asking Sam to design a new look for her upcoming tour.

What happens between Sam and Mary while they're alone in Sam's remote English home is difficult to parse; "Mother Mary" is a story about the connection between these two women, but it's also a slippery, gripping ghost story that leaves plenty to the imagination. As great as Hathaway is elsewhere on screen in 2026, "Mother Mary" is her peak. Not only does she convincingly sell her identity as a Lady Gaga-style pop star who dons halos and headdresses and intricate costumes for her massively popular tours, she's also wholly human as the stripped-down, often misery-fueled Mary we see at Sam's workshop, and her chemistry with Coel is absolutely stunning. Hathaway is one of our best performers without question, and "Mother Mary," her most audacious, weird, and rewarding 2026 project, features her best performance of the year.