Anora Review: How Sean Baker's Scrappy Drama Won Best Picture

Sean Baker’s Anora is the kind of movie that sneaks up on you. It opens like a raucous comedy, shifts into something resembling a crime caper, and then, in its final minutes, delivers an emotional gut punch so precise it rewrites everything you just watched. When it won Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards back in March 2025, it felt like the most satisfying Oscar surprise in years. Not because it was unexpected by that point. By the time the film had swept from the Palme d’Or at Cannes to virtually every major precursor award, the momentum was undeniable. But because the Academy actually got it right. Now, more than a year later, the film holds up even better on revisits. This review has been a long time coming, because Anora deserves more than a quick take. It deserves a proper reckoning.

Mikey Madison plays Ani, a young sex worker at a Brooklyn strip club who catches the eye of Ivan, the reckless, childish son of a Russian oligarch played by Mark Eydelshteyn. What follows is a whirlwind Vegas marriage, a Brooklyn apartment full of chaos, and a collision between Ani’s hard-won street smarts and the sheer, stupid power of oligarch money. Baker has always been drawn to people living on the margins, but Anora might be his sharpest, most fully realized version of that impulse. The fact that this scrappy, profane, deeply human film about a sex worker from Brighton Beach won the Palme d’Or and then went on to claim Best Picture remains one of the great recent stories in American cinema.

Mikey Madison Owns Every Frame

Let’s just say it: this is one of the great screen performances of the decade so far. Mikey Madison carries Anora on her back, and she makes it look effortless. Ani is funny, sharp, vulnerable, delusional, and deeply human, sometimes all within the same scene. The early club sequences crackle with her energy. She’s working, and Madison lets you see the calculation behind every smile, every laugh, every touch. Ani isn’t naive. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She just doesn’t know what Ivan’s family is capable of.

The marriage sequence in Las Vegas is pure sugar rush filmmaking. Baker shoots it like a rom-com montage on speed, all neon and champagne and giddy spontaneity. Madison sells every second of it. You want this to work out for Ani even though you know, on some level, that it can’t. And when the other shoe drops, when Ivan’s parents send their enforcers to annul the marriage, Madison pivots without missing a beat. Ani doesn’t crumble. She fights. Physically, verbally, legally. She claws at every inch of ground because this marriage, real or not, is the first time anyone has treated her like she mattered.

The Longest Night in Brooklyn

The middle section of Anora is where Baker’s genius for controlled chaos really shines. Three men, Toros, Garnick, and Igor, show up at the apartment to drag Ivan home and undo the marriage. What follows is essentially a long, messy, darkly funny hostage situation that stretches across one night in Brooklyn. Baker shoots it almost in real time, and the tonal balance is extraordinary. One moment you’re laughing at the sheer absurdity of these bumbling enforcers trying to wrangle a screaming Ani while Ivan hides in the bathroom. The next moment, you feel the genuine menace underneath it all. These men work for an oligarch. They’re not going to lose.

Yura Borisov deserves special mention here as Igor, the quietest of the three enforcers. He barely speaks for most of the film, but his eyes are doing constant work. He’s the only one who seems to actually see Ani as a person rather than a problem to solve. Baker plants the seeds of something between them so subtly that you almost don’t notice until the film’s devastating final scene. Karren Karagulian also brings a weary, exasperated energy to Toros that keeps the comedy grounded. He’s a man who just wants to do his job and go home, and Ani is making that impossible.

Baker’s Scrappy Cinderella

Sean Baker has spent his career making films about sex workers, transgender women, and people scraping by in the margins of American capitalism. From Tangerine to The Florida Project to Red Rocket, his films share a consistent DNA: handheld energy, non-professional actors mixed with pros, and a refusal to sentimentalize poverty or judge the people living in it. Anora was his biggest canvas yet, and the leap in scale didn’t dilute his sensibility one bit. The Metacritic score of 91 tells you the critical consensus, but numbers don’t capture the way this film gets under your skin.

What’s smart about the Cinderella metaphor running through the film is that Baker doesn’t use it ironically, at least not entirely. Ani really does want the fairy tale. She’s not stupid for wanting it. The film’s tragedy is that the systems arrayed against her, money, power, family, nationality, are so vast that wanting isn’t enough. The glass slipper doesn’t fit because it was never designed for someone like her.

But Baker also refuses to let the film become a miserabilist exercise. Anora is genuinely, frequently hilarious. The comedy comes from character, from the friction between Ani’s ferocity and the escalating incompetence of the men around her. There’s a car chase sequence that plays like something out of a Safdie brothers film, all close-quarters panic and shouted profanity, and it works because Baker has earned the tonal volatility. You can laugh because the film trusts you to also feel the danger.

That Ending

Without spoiling the specifics, the final scene of Anora is the reason the film lingers. After everything, after the fighting and the screaming and the running, Ani ends up in a car with Igor. What happens between them is quiet, tentative, and then suddenly, painfully real. Madison does something in that scene that I’ve watched multiple times now and still can’t fully explain. She breaks. Not dramatically, not with a big movie-star cry. She just stops holding it together. The camera stays on her face, and you watch Ani reckon with the full weight of what just happened, what she lost, what she never really had.

It’s the kind of ending that recontextualizes the whole movie. All the comedy, all the chaos, all the defiance. It was all a defense mechanism. Ani was always this vulnerable. She just couldn’t afford to show it.

From the Croisette to the Dolby Theatre

The journey of this film is almost as remarkable as the film itself. When Anora premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and took the Palme d’Or, it announced itself as something special. But Palme d’Or winners don’t always translate to American awards success. Baker’s film did, and it did so by being completely itself. It didn’t sand down its edges for Oscar voters. It didn’t add a prestige sheen or soften Ani’s rougher qualities. It trusted that the rawness was the whole point.

Baker joining the ranks of Best Picture-winning directors remains a wild trajectory for someone who shot his breakout film on iPhones. But that scrappy independence is exactly what makes Anora feel so different from the typical Oscar winner. It doesn’t have the sheen of a Spielberg production or the weight of a historical epic. It has Mikey Madison screaming obscenities in a Brooklyn apartment while three men try to stuff her into a car. And it has that final scene, the one where everything else falls away and you’re left with just a young woman sitting in silence, finally letting herself feel the full cost of the fairy tale she almost had. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.

If you still haven’t seen Anora, go watch it. With a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 91 on Metacritic, the critical consensus was overwhelming, and the film has only grown in stature since its Oscar win. Then come back and tell me it didn’t wreck you. If you’re in the mood for more films that hit this hard, Is God Is just arrived in theaters this week with its own raw, uncompromising take on family and revenge. And Bill Nighy’s 500 Miles also landed this week, another small-scale drama about fractured family bonds. Browse more dramas in our collection for the full range.