Winner: Palme d’Or, 2024 Cannes Film Festival
Sean Baker’s latest casts Mikey Madison as a sex worker named Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called. She may live in a shabby Brooklyn apartment above the rattle of the subway, but every night, Ani glams up and puts on a flirty smile for the men at a local club.
Between myriad lap dances, Ani finds herself talking to Vanya, a young Russian boy who joyfully throws around his parents’ money. His innocence charms Ani, and the two fall into a comfortable rhythm. She shows him a good time, and he opens the door to a charmed life she could only have imagined. They begin a whirlwind romance that’s soon threatened by Vanya’s powerful family. Ani finds herself gripping onto a fantasy by her long pink fingernails.
From quick-cut montages to anxious extended sequences, ANORA showcases a filmmaker in brilliant command of his craft, expertly upholding a tragicomical tone for a story that keeps us on the edge of our seat.
Painting the air blue with her profanity, Madison is unflinching, delivering an unforgettably charismatic performance. It’s another stalwart actor-director partnership for Baker, who builds on his work in TANGERINE, THE FLORIDA PROJECT and RED ROCKET for his most propulsive film yet, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
“There are few filmmakers as open-hearted, as stone-soup inventive, as Baker is. In movies like TANGERINE and THE FLORIDA PROJECT, he’s always shown a knack for doing a lot with a little. But with ANORA, so playful yet so emotionally fine-grained, he maybe does the most. It's his best movie yet.” —Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine
“This star-making turn by Mikey Madison is deserving of the praise she has already generated in this Palme d’Or-winning gem… This heroic journey is Ani’s story through and through. It’s a brilliant role, written with such range that it takes Madison’s strong performance to bring her to life without succumbing to archness. She makes us believe every second….” —Jason Gorber, The A.V. Club
“Baker continually ups the ante on the picture’s unruly humour and propulsive pacing. The headlong, no-brakes approach to storytelling will likely be familiar to fans of Baker’s other pictures…but this kick-ass Cinderella story has its own distinctive flavour and appeal.” —Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
“Splenetically hilarious for more than two hours before reality catches up with it in the film’s unforgettable final scene, ANORAhas next to nothing to do with romance, and almost everything to do with the kind of working-class heartache that a modern Hollywood studio would never even try to get right.” —David Ehrlich, IndieWire