13 Movies Like Anora That Capture Sean Baker's Energy

Sean Baker makes movies that feel like they’re running on caffeine, cheap vodka, and sheer desperation. Anora earned its Palme d’Or by doing something most Hollywood films are too scared to try: building an entire movie around a sex worker’s chaotic marriage to a Russian oligarch’s son, then letting the whole thing unravel in real time across Brooklyn. If you’re looking for movies like Anora, films that share that same raw, scrappy energy with working-class characters who refuse to be pitied, this list is for you.

What makes Anora special isn’t just its subject matter. It’s the texture. Baker shoots his characters like he found them on the street and just started rolling. The comedy is sharp, the drama hits like a gut punch, and Mikey Madison’s performance is one of those rare things where you genuinely forget someone is acting. These 14 films share some combination of that spirit: stories about people living on the margins, romances that burn too hot to last, economic desperation dressed up as something else, and a camera that refuses to look away.

The Baker Blueprint

Before diving into the recommendations, it’s worth understanding what makes Baker’s filmography so distinctive. His earlier films, Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017), established the template that Anora perfected. Tangerine was shot entirely on an iPhone 5s and followed a transgender sex worker tearing through Hollywood on Christmas Eve. The Florida Project watched a six-year-old and her mother scrape by in a motel on the outskirts of Disney World, with Willem Dafoe’s motel manager trying to hold everything together. And Red Rocket (2021) gave us Simon Rex as a washed-up porn star who rolls back into his small Texas town and immediately starts scheming again.

What connects all of Baker’s work is the refusal to sentimentalize poverty, the chaotic energy of characters who perform versions of themselves to survive, and a camera that treats strip clubs and cheap motels with the same visual attention most directors reserve for palaces. The films below all share some piece of that DNA. Some match the scrappy intimacy. Others share the class dynamics, the volatile relationships, or the willingness to let characters be ugly and beautiful in the same breath.

Scrappy and Intimate: New Films on the Same Frequency

Blue Film (2026)

Elliot Tuttle’s debut shares Anora’s willingness to ground a story in sex work without turning exploitative. A queer camboy takes a paid gig expecting anonymity and ends up genuinely connecting with the stranger who hired him. The whole movie unfolds over a single encounter between two men played by Reed Birney and Kieron Moore, and the intimacy builds slowly until it becomes almost unbearable. Where Anora is expansive and loud, Blue Film is small and quiet, but both films understand the same thing: transactional relationships don’t stay transactional. Tuttle earns every uncomfortable silence in this thing.

Levitating (2026)

Set in an Indonesian town where spiritual possession is treated as entertainment, this follows Bayu, a young man trying to become the shaman of a trance party so he can raise money to prevent his family’s eviction. Wregas Bhanuteja finds something Baker would recognize immediately: a character who performs spectacle to survive economically. The setup sounds fantastical, but the mechanics are completely grounded. Bayu isn’t choosing between art and commerce. He’s figuring out how to make the thing people will pay to see, because the alternative is losing his home. That hustle, the specific desperation of turning yourself into a product, is pure Anora territory.

Is God Is (2026)

Aleshea Harris adapts her own play about two sisters on an epic revenge quest, and the result is one of the most propulsive films released this year. Kara Young and Mallori Johnson play Racine and Anaia with a fury that never lets up. The film escalates constantly, each scene pushing the sisters further past the point of no return. It’s not tonally identical to Anora, but it shares that same quality of watching characters barrel forward into chaos because stopping would mean confronting something worse. The family trauma underneath the road-movie surface gives the violence real weight. Sterling K. Brown and Janelle Monáe round out the cast, and the whole thing crackles with an energy that refuses to sit still.

500 Miles (2026)

Two brothers flee trouble in England to reach their estranged grandfather in Ireland. Finn is sixteen and trying to hold it together. His younger brother Charlie is a livewire who won’t stop making things harder. Bill Nighy shows up as the grandfather and brings exactly the kind of weathered warmth you’d expect, but the film belongs to Roman Griffin Davis and Dexter Sol Ansell. Morgan Matthews keeps things grounded in a way that reminded me of early Andrea Arnold: kids navigating a world built by adults who let them down, filmed with handheld intimacy and a refusal to manufacture easy resolutions. The broken-family rawness here runs deep.

TRAD (2026)

A gifted young fiddle player and her little brother hit the road with wandering musicians across the Donegal Gaeltacht and beyond. It’s a different universe from Brooklyn strip clubs, but the DNA is recognizable: young people with talent and no money trying to outrun their circumstances through sheer force of will. Megan Nic Fhionnghaile carries the film with a stubbornness that feels real, and Aidan Gillen lurks on the margins as a complicated presence. Lance Daly shoots Ireland like Baker shoots Florida: as a place that’s simultaneously beautiful and indifferent to the people struggling inside it.

Cross-Currents: International Films on the Same Wavelength

Parallel Tales (2026)

Asghar Farhadi directing Isabelle Huppert and Virginie Efira in a story about a novelist who spies on her neighbors through a telescope? That’s already interesting. Farhadi has built his career on watching ordinary people make terrible decisions and then tracing the fallout with surgical precision. Efira’s character hires a young man named Adam to help with her daily routine, and the boundaries between observer and participant start to dissolve. The class dynamics between characters, the moral ambiguity, the sense that everyone has a secret agenda: that’s Farhadi’s signature, and it overlaps with the power imbalances that drive Anora. Vincent Cassel adds another layer of tension to a film already loaded with it.

Allegro Pastell (2026)

Anna Roller’s film captures a very specific feeling: a relationship that looks perfect from the outside but is quietly disintegrating in the details. A novelist and a web designer navigate their long-distance arrangement during the summer of 2018, and Roller shoots their everyday locations, their half-finished conversations, with a precision that makes the mundane feel loaded. What connects it to Anora isn’t the chaos. It’s the honesty about how money, geography, and ambition shape who we love and whether love survives those pressures. The Berlin-to-countryside dynamic mirrors Baker’s attention to how place determines possibility. Sylvaine Faligant and Jannis Niewöhner play the couple with an understatement that makes their silences feel louder than arguments.

My Dearest Señorita (2026)

Adela is a solitary only child from a conservative Spanish family, spending her days between the family antique shop and the catechism classes she teaches. Everything about her life is controlled, quiet, suffocating. Then it isn’t. Fernando González Molina builds a story about someone discovering who they actually are underneath decades of repression, and Elisabeth Martínez plays Adela’s awakening with a subtlety that reminded me of how Baker lets his characters reveal themselves gradually. The conservative family dynamics, the economic dependency, the moment a character decides to stop performing the version of themselves everyone else expects: these are themes Anora explores too, just in a very different key.

Dilan ITB 1997 (2026)

Set against the political turmoil leading up to Indonesia’s Reformation era, this follows a student who returned from Cuba in March 1997 and navigates campus life while the country around him is about to rupture. The political backdrop isn’t decoration. It creates the same pressure-cooker environment that Baker builds in Anora, where personal choices can’t be separated from the larger systems bearing down on you. The romance and the politics feed each other, and the period-specific detail gives the film a specificity that keeps it from feeling generic.

Relationships Under Pressure

Couples Weekend (2026)

I’ll be honest: this one is uneven. But the premise works. Two couples head to the woods for New Year’s Eve, and an unexpected event forces everyone to stop pretending their lives are fine. Alexandra Daddario and Daveed Diggs do solid work, and there’s a scene midway through where Josh Gad’s character finally says the thing everyone has been avoiding that genuinely lands. It’s messier than Anora, and not always in the good way. Still, if you’re drawn to stories where polite surfaces crack open and people start saying what they actually mean, it scratches that itch. Think of it as Anora’s apartment fight translated into upper-middle-class passive aggression.

森中有林 (2026)

This Chinese family saga chronicles four decades in the lives of people rooted in the soil of Northeast China, cycling through prosperity and hardship, love and resentment. It’s structurally nothing like Anora, but Yu Hewei and Gao Yuanyuan anchor it with the same kind of lived-in authenticity that makes Baker’s casts feel like real people caught on camera. The film takes the long view on the economic forces that shape families, showing how money, or the lack of it, determines everything from who stays to who leaves. If Anora is a firecracker, this is a slow burn that covers the same ground over generations.

Rose (2026)

Markus Schleinzer sets his film during the Thirty Years’ War, which puts it about as far from modern Brooklyn as you can get. But stay with me. Sandra Hüller plays a mysterious soldier who arrives in a secluded Protestant village claiming to be heir to a long-abandoned manor. The quest for recognition and acceptance in a hostile community, the performance of identity to gain power, the way economic desperation warps every human interaction: strip away the period costumes and you’re looking at dynamics Baker understands instinctively. Hüller, fresh off her extraordinary work in Anatomy of a Fall, brings that same coiled intensity to a character who has to convince everyone around her she belongs.

Tayuan 2 (2026)

A charming bus conductor drawn to both men and women feels an unexpected spark with a shy commuter. On crowded bus rides where bodies brush, desire grows and love becomes messy. It’s small-scale and unapologetically sensual, and the confined setting of a bus creates a natural pressure cooker for desire that can’t be expressed openly. Baker has always been interested in how physical spaces shape intimacy, how a motel room or a strip club or a backseat becomes its own little world with its own rules. Tayuan 2 does something similar with a public bus, turning routine commutes into charged encounters where everything is happening just beneath the surface.

If Anora taught us anything, it’s that the best stories come from people who aren’t supposed to get their own movies. Every film on this list shares some piece of that philosophy, whether it’s the economic precarity, the volatile relationships, or the willingness to let characters be ugly and beautiful in the same breath. Start with Baker’s own earlier films if you haven’t seen them, then branch out from there. Browse more dramas in our collection for deeper dives into this kind of raw, character-driven filmmaking. And if you still haven’t seen Anora, fix that immediately.