Lorene Scafaria

In I Love LA (2025), a woman says something supportive to a friend and, halfway through the sentence, decides it is also an opportunity. Most directors would cut on the laugh. Scafaria stays on Maia's face, and it is in that extra second that the joke turns into something else. We laughed, and then we felt a little ashamed, because we had been doing the same arithmetic she had. That is her habit: hold the shot a beat past comfort, and let the audience catch themselves. Of the four directors on that series she is the one whose episodes we remember.

She began as a writer, and it shows. Her first major credit was the screenplay for Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008), and her first two features as writer-director, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012) and The Meddler (2015), are small films about relationships under pressure, an apocalyptic romance and a mother-daughter story drawn from her own loss, and neither is much to look at. Hustlers (2019) changed the scale. A crime drama taken from real events, about strippers working the men of Wall Street through the 2008 crash, it is the film that made her name, and what people noticed was the staging: dance and performance sequences shot with a control the earlier films had not attempted, and a story that stayed clear while the camera moved. She has said she was interested in the impact the recession had on these women who worked in Wall Street's backyard, and that is the film's angle. The money is the subject; the friendship is the story.

Since then it has mostly been television, which for a director who likes faces is not a demotion. She directed episodes of New Girl, three of Succession between 2021 and 2023, including 'Too Much Birthday', and I Love LA, where she is also an executive producer. We rate Succession as highly as anything we have reviewed, and we cannot tell you which of its virtues are hers, because a series like that is built to make its directors invisible and she obliged. I Love LA shows her more plainly. Our reservations about it, the noise and the thin satire, are not hers to answer for; the moments we liked mostly are.

Her strength is sympathy without a lecture. She puts women inside systems that are rigged against them, lets them behave badly, and does not send anyone on afterwards to explain who was wronged. The risk of that method is obvious. A director who refuses to say who is right can look, on a slow day, like one who has not decided, and the early features suggest that without a strong visual idea her material can sit there being pleasant. Hustlers proved she has the idea when the film demands one.

Start with Hustlers, then watch her I Love LA episodes and count how often she stays on a face after everyone else would have cut. She should be making features again. We would like to see what she does with a room full of women and nobody in it to like.