Anora is a 2024 American comedy drama film produced, written, directed, and edited by Sean Baker. It follows the beleaguered marriage between Anora Mikheeva (Mikey Madison), a sex worker, and Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch. The supporting cast includes Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, and Aleksei Serebryakov. Anora premiered on May 21, 2024, at the 77th Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim, and was released theatrically on October 18 by Neon. It grossed $37.4 million worldwide on a $6 million budget, becoming Baker's highest-grossing film. Anora received numerous accolades. It won the Palme d'Or, was named one of the top 10 films of 2024 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute, and received six nominations at the 97th Academy Awards (including Best Picture), five nominations at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards (including Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical), and seven at British Academy Film Awards (including Best Film), winning Best Actress for Madison and Best Casting at the latter.

Plot

Anora "Ani" Mikheeva is a 23-year-old stripper living in Brighton Beach, a Russian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn. Her boss introduces her to Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov, the young son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, Nikolai Zakharov. Vanya is in the United States to study, but prefers to party and play video games in his family's Brooklyn mansion. Vanya hires Ani for several sexual encounters and pays her $15,000 to stay with him for a week. Vanya and his entourage fly to Las Vegas, where Vanya asks Ani to marry him so that he can obtain a green card instead of returning to Russia to work for his father. Although Ani is skeptical, Vanya insists his love is genuine, and they elope to a Vegas wedding chapel. Ani quits her job and moves into Vanya's mansion. When news of the wedding spreads to Russia, Vanya's mother, Galina, orders his Armenian godfather, Toros, to find the couple and arrange an annulment while she and her husband fly to the US. Toros sends his henchmen, Garnik and Igor, to the house. They inform Vanya that his parents will take him back to Russia, and enrage Ani by calling her a prostitute. Vanya flees and Ani fights Garnik and Igor, injuring them and destroying furniture, but they tie her up. When Toros arrives, he lectures Ani about Vanya's immaturity, confiscates Ani's wedding ring, has her gagged, and offers her $10,000 to accept the annulment. Ani insists that she and Vanya are in love, but agrees to help Toros find him. Ani, Toros, Garnik, and Igor spend the night driving around Brooklyn looking for Vanya. Ani's friends inform her that he is at her former workplace with another stripper. The group arrives there to find Vanya too intoxicated to listen to them, forcing them to wait outside the courthouse overnight. The next day, the annulment is thrown out of court because Ani and Vanya were wed in Nevada. At the airport, Ani introduces herself to Nikolai and Galina in Russian, but Galina immediately rejects her. Vanya concedes to his parents and coldly tells Ani that their marriage is impossible while Galina orders everyone on the plane to Las Vegas. Ani, having not signed a prenuptial agreement, threatens to force Vanya through divorce proceedings, but Galina threatens to destroy her life if she does. Finally realizing Vanya's immaturity and his family's power, Ani agrees to the annulment. After the papers are signed, Igor suggests that Vanya apologize to Ani, but Galina insists that her son will not apologize to anyone. Ani insults Vanya and Galina before leaving. Igor takes Ani back to New York to pack up her belongings. While spending one final night at the Zakharov mansion, Igor attempts friendly banter with Ani. However, she is upset by their first encounter, arguing that he assaulted her and would have raped her had they been alone, which he denies. In the morning, Igor gives Ani the money Toros promised her and drives her home. In the car, he returns Ani's wedding ring as a token of goodwill. Ani initiates sex with Igor but stops when he attempts to kiss her; she breaks down, sobbing in his arms.

Cast

Production

The director, Sean Baker, said Anora was inspired by a story from a friend about a Russian-American newlywed who was kidnapped for collateral. He was also inspired by his work in 2000 and 2001, when he edited wedding videos, including ones of Russian-Americans in New York. Baker said his intentions were towards "telling human stories, by telling stories that are hopefully universal [...] It's helping remove the stigma that's been applied to [sex work], that's always been applied to this livelihood." Baker hired Andrea Werhun, a Canadian writer and actress known for her 2018 memoir Modern Whore about her prior time as a sex worker, as a creative consultant. Baker cast Mikey Madison after seeing her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and Scream (2022). He hired Madison without an audition. Madison learned Russian, visited strip clubs, and studied the Brooklyn accent to prepare. Although some media outlets incorrectly reported that Anora Mikheeva was Uzbek-American, Baker said that Anora "is of Russian ethnicity" and "from one of the post-Soviet countries". Principal photography took place starting in February 2023 in Brooklyn, including the neighborhoods of Brighton Beach, Coney Island, and Sheepshead Bay. Anora was filmed over 37 days, with the 25-minute home invasion scene taking 10 days. It was shot on Kodak 35 mm film framed in 4-perf widescreen anamorphic using an Arricam LT, with color correction completed via DaVinci Resolve at FotoKem. Vintage LOMO prime and zoom lenses were mainly used for filming, while Atlas Orion lenses were used for low-light scenes. Scenes were also shot at the Palms Casino Resort and on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. The film's cinematography was inspired by 1970s crime dramas set in New York, including The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Alex Coco, one of the producers, worked as a disc jockey for the music in the scenes in the club. Baker is credited with the casting, with the cast including more than 30 different speaking parts. For the Zakharov mansion, Baker filmed at 2458 National Drive, a Mill Basin mansion once owned by Vasily Anisimov, an oligarch with ties to Russia. Baker had searched on Google for "the biggest and best mansion in Brighton Beach". To learn more about the area, Baker and Mikey Madison temporarily moved to southern Brooklyn during pre-production. Toros and Ani's search for Vanya was filmed in a number of restaurants and clubs that the producers had frequented. At a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, Madison said that Baker and the producer Samantha Quan, Baker's wife, would act out different sex positions to demonstrate what they wanted the actors to do. Madison was offered an intimacy coordinator, but said: "As I'd already created a really comfortable relationship with both of them for about a year, I felt that that would be where I was most comfortable with and it ended up working so perfectly." The soundtrack includes Robin Schulz rework of "Greatest Day" by Take That and "All the Things She Said" by t.A.T.u. Madison also shared that her friend curated a "stripper playlist" for her to get into character, including tracks from Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Slayyyter.

Release

Worldwide distribution rights were acquired by FilmNation Entertainment in October 2023. The film was then sold by FilmNation to Le Pacte for France, Lev for Israel, Kismet for Australia and New Zealand, and Focus Features/Universal Pictures International for the rest of the world excluding North America in deals similar to those made on Baker's previous film, Red Rocket. In November 2023, Neon acquired North American distribution rights to the film, and opened it in limited release on October 18, 2024. Anora premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2024, and won the festival's Palme d'Or on May 25. It earned a 10-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. It became the fifth consecutive Palme d'Or winner distributed by Neon in the United States, and the first American-produced film to win the Palme d'Or since Terrence Malick's 2011 epic The Tree of Life. Anora also played at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the San Sebastián International Film Festival, the Busan International Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, the 19th Rome Film Festival and several others. It was also the closing film at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2024. The film was released on digital platforms on December 17, 2024. It will be released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection on April 29, 2025.

Reception

= Box office

= As of February 20, 2025, Anora had grossed $15.5 million in the United States and Canada, and $21.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $37.4 million. In the United States, the film made $550,503 in its opening weekend from six theaters; its per-screen-average of $91,751 was the best of 2024 (topping Kinds of Kindness' $75,458 average), and the second-best since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (after Asteroid City's $142,230). Expanding to 34 theaters in its sophomore weekend, the film made $908,830 and finished in eighth place. Continuing its expansion, the film made $1.8 million from 253 theaters and $2.5 million from 1,104 in its third and fourth weekends.

= Critical response

= On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 326 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Another marvelous chronicle of America's strivers by writer-director Sean Baker given some extra pizzazz by Mikey Madison's brassy performance, Anora is a romantic drama on the bleeding edge." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 91 out of 100, based on 62 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". On AlloCiné, the film received an average rating of 4.2 out of 5, based on 45 reviews, from French critics. Greta Gerwig, serving as the president of the 77th Cannes Film Festival Jury, commented that "[Anora] was something we collectively felt we were transported by, we were moved by [...] It felt both new and in conversation with older forms of cinema. There was something about it that reminded us of [the] classic structures of Lubitsch or Howard Hawks, and then it did something completely truthful and unexpected." Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair wrote: "[Anora is] a wild, profane blast [...] Even when Baker's storytelling and dialogue gets repetitive, Madison keeps things lively [...] I found myself torn between finding Baker's conclusions compassionate and sensing a vague whiff of something patronizing. [...] Baker's explorations of outsiders tend to tread between graciousness and gawking, benevolent anthropology and the more malevolent, missionary kind." Justin Chang of The New Yorker wrote: "Anora plays like a wild dream—first joyous, then catastrophic, and always fiercely unpredictable [...] A contemporary return to screwball tradition is a welcome but challenging proposition, and Baker's play with the form is hardly seamless. [Anora] built up a righteous steam of fury, now unleashes it against the Ivans of the world and salutes those toiling thanklessly in their employ." Sight and Sound named Anora the second-best film of 2024, and Film Comment named it one of the ten best. Anora was praised by many filmmakers and actors. In 2025, Collider ranked the film at number 36 on its list of "The 40 Best Movies of the 2020s," with Jeremy Urquhart writing "It’s always character-focused, and genuinely empathetic, too, but never shies away from being exciting, funny, and heartbreaking when it needs to be, on a narrative front. Anora keeps things pretty grounded, but proves ambitious when it comes to things like style and genre. There’s a lot that’s balanced exceptionally well throughout, maybe even enough to make Anora already feel like something of a modern classic." Films Fatale ranked it at number 9 on its list of "The 50 Best Films of the 2020s," with Andreas Babiolakis writing "Sean Baker has always aimed to provide a voice for the voiceless; even a finally-sizeable budget won’t stop him from doing so. Anora — his greatest feature to date — turns a whirlwind romance in the life of a sex worker into a modern day fairy tale, until the sharp edge of the knife of reality twists into fantasy and kills it for good."

Reaction from sex work community

Anora received praise from some sex workers for its depiction of the profession, which they described as a step forward from films of the past that tended to portray sex work as a social transgression worthy of condemnation. In a piece for Slate, Risdon Roberts compared the character of Ani to Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman, writing the former "is not a desperate or trafficked waif, nor is she a hooker with a heart of gold. Baker doesn't even set out to make [Ani] worthy of sympathy—instead, we're in awe of her prowess as she works the floor of a high-end strip club while the opening credits play...Right away, it's clear that we're rooting for Ani not because she's down and out like Vivian—we're rooting for her because she's shrewd and in control". Tiff Smith said, "We're seeing a fully developed character doing sex work without their profession defining them — that's what representation really is." Some said Baker's hiring of sex workers for the production, both as consultants and as cast members, was reflected in the film's attention to detail like the mundane realities of strip club life and labor issues. Others felt that the film reverted to regressive stereotypes about sex workers as downtrodden and "in need of saving." A UK-based sex worker commented that the film "rehashes the 'traumatised, vulnerable sex worker' trope, which we've seen a thousand times before". Marla Cruz opined that little is revealed about Ani's life outside of sex work, and that an exploration of the "boundary between Ani the person and Ani the worker" is absent. Ayanna Dozier wrote "the film narratively builds upon and follows the social imaginaries of sex workers as subhuman projections for other people's fantasies". Cruz wrote that it is debatable "whether Ani becomes more clear-eyed about her relationship to power, men, and money throughout the film". Though Roberts appreciated the film generally, she critiqued the ending, writing that for real-life sex workers, the true goal is not to be saved by a man, but "is about survival (or, ideally, transcending the need to survive)". She added that rather than representing the knights in shining armor archetype, "Clients are a means to an end. Money can't break your heart."

Accolades

Anora won the Palme d'Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. It was subsequently nominated for five awards at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards, seven awards at the 78th British Academy Film Awards, winning Best Actress and Best Casting, and six awards at the 97th Academy Awards with Baker, Madison and Borisov receiving nominations at each of the ceremonies. The National Board of Review and the American Film Institute named Anora as one of the top 10 films of 2024. At the 30th Critics' Choice Awards, it became the first film to only win Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Picture and none of its other six nominations. The film also won the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture and the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film.

See also

List of American films of 2024 American independent cinema Social realism

References

Works cited

Macaulay, Scott (2024). "Swept Off Her Feet". Filmmaker. Vol. 33, no. 1.

External links

Official website Anora at Neon Films Anora at IMDb Official Screenplay Archived January 1, 2025, at the Wayback Machine