NEW IN THEATERS! Sean Baker can do no wrong. His three most notable features – Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket – are all bona fide masterpieces. Anora, the 2024 Palme d’Or winner, continues his streak of poignant tales about boisterous, enigmatic, passionate, flawed, very real characters living on society’s fringes, overcoming drastic odds to achieve a semblance of redemption. In equal measures kinetic, heartrending, and side-splitting, the romantic drama, above all, has two major things going for it: the sublime Mikey Madison in the lead and a finale that will carve out your soul in the best possible way. Endings are the most difficult part but Baker always nails them.
Anora (Madison), or Ani, as she prefers to be called, is a no-nonsense dancer/sex worker who one day meets Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein), the handsome son of a Russian oligarch. A party boy with an endless supply of cash, Ivan seems infatuated with Ani, paying her the big bucks to party with his friends, come back to his parents’ mansion for delirious sex, and fly to Vegas to gamble away stacks of cash. One day, he proposes to her. Starry-eyed, perhaps also having fallen for the raucous charmer, Ani accepts. That’s when the trouble begins.

“…it’s up to Ani and the men to locate him and get the wedding sorted before the oligarchs arrive.”
Upon finding out about their son’s endeavor, Ivan’s enraged parents send their goons – the prone-to-stress tough-guy-priest Toros (Karren Karagulian), the even tougher-looking but rather fragile Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov), the quiet and reluctant participant – to remedy the matter: annul the wedding and send their indolent son back to Russia. An increasingly stressful series of situations ensue, but to condense it, Ivan disappears, and it’s up to Ani and the men to locate him and get the wedding sorted before the oligarchs arrive.
The laughs in Anora come in so fast and frequently that they almost eclipse the underlying tension; things are constantly on the edge of exploding, amusement on the verge of anxiety. Like in the similarly-hued Uncut Gems, one senses that things may not end well for these characters… but don’t bet on it. You never know with Baker. I honestly had no idea what to expect at any given point in this enthralling piece, which is a magical feat in itself.