Movie · 2024 · Drama, Comedy, Romance · 2h 19m · R · English
Curator score: 7.9/10 (2.7M ratings)
Love is a hustle.
Overview
A young sex worker from Brooklyn gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as his parents set out to get the marriage annulled.
Ratings
Curator score: 7.9/10
IMDb: 7.4/10
Letterboxd: 3.79/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
Metacritic: 91
TMDB: 7.1/10
Director
Sean Baker
Production
Cre Film, FilmNation Entertainment
Cast
Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Luna Sofía Miranda, Lindsey Normington, Darya Ekamasova, Aleksey Serebryakov, Anton Bitter, Ivy Wolk, Vlad Mamai, Maria Tichinskaya, Paul Weissman, Emily Weider, Vincent Radwinsky, Brittney Rodriguez, Sophia Carnabuci, Ella Rubin, Ross Brodar
Where to watch
Hulu
Curator Review
Verdict
A brash, funny, and increasingly bruising Cinderella-gone-wrong that turns a whirlwind romance into a chaotic class-comedy and survival story. It’s sharp on performance, pace, and social texture, with enough emotional sting to outlast the jokes.
Best for
Viewers who like dark comedies with real emotional fallout
Fans of character-driven stories about sex work and class
People who enjoy propulsive, messy relationship movies
Audiences open to a film that is both funny and painful
Skip if
You want a conventional romance with tidy payoff
You dislike abrasive humor and sexual explicitness
You prefer films that keep a strong, stable emotional viewpoint
You’re looking for a soft, sentimental underdog story
Overview
Anora is a screwball romance that keeps mutating into something meaner, sadder, and more revealing. What starts as a fantasy of escape becomes a pressure-cooker about money, power, and the way people perform intimacy when they think they’ve found an exit ramp. The movie is funniest when it is most unstable, and that instability is part of its point.
Worth noting
Sean Baker stages the chaos with a street-level confidence that makes every turn feel lived-in, not engineered. The film’s energy comes from collision: fantasy against reality, desire against leverage, comedy against humiliation. Mikey Madison anchors it with a performance that can flip from swagger to exhaustion in a beat.
Bottom line
It won’t work for viewers who want the film to be gentler or more openly romantic about its heroine. But if you’re drawn to movies that use genre play to expose class and gender power dynamics, this is one of the year’s most vivid and talkative examples. It lands as a joke that slowly reveals its bruise.
Top Letterboxd reviews
ava adore (4★) · 75232 likes
A terrifying tale of dating a mama’s boy
kauan. (5★) · 54976 likes
That's why you shouldn't trust twinks
samara (1★) · 41412 likes
it’s really sad to me that a character driven piece about a woman fails to make a real character out of her. we do not see anora’s desires or emotions outside of a punchline or even outside of her husband who she met the week before. in the film, the distinction between anora’s work and personal lives is blurred to the point where it’s nonexistent. i believe this is where the majority of my problems with the film arise. the… more it’s really sad to me that a character driven piece about a woman fails to make a real character out of her. we do not see anora’s desires or emotions outside of a punchline or even outside of her husband who she met the week before. in the film, the distinction between anora’s work and personal lives is blurred to the point where it’s nonexistent. i believe this is where the majority of my problems with the film arise. the… more
Sam (4.5★) · 35025 likes
Sean Baker does for sex workers what Martin Scorsese did for Gangsters
Drew Burnett Gregory (3★) · 24469 likes
Once Igor appears on screen the movie shifts to his perspective. (Or, in a way, it clarifies the perspective it already had.) Baker expects us to be impressed that Igor views Ani as a human being. He seems to expect the same praise for himself.
I’m not impressed. I’m impressed by his skills as a filmmaker. But I prefer a straight dude voyeur director to spare us the self-righteousness.
2013 · Crime, Drama, Comedy · 3h · R · Curator 7.9/10 (5.7M ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, AMC+, Philo, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A riotous, self-destructive ride through excess, charm, and the collapse of fantasy into consequence.