Anora Review: Is The Award-Winning Movie Worth Watching?

Yes, Anora is absolutely worth watching. It’s a film that has earned its accolades through genuine artistry and innovation, not hype.

When a movie wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes, dominates the Academy Awards with five wins including Best Picture, and earns a Rotten Tomatoes score of 90+, that combination of critical consensus and popular recognition indicates something worth your time.

The film’s central premise—a young sex worker from Brooklyn who marries the son of a Russian oligarch and finds herself caught in a collision between two worlds—sounds like a premise you might dismiss as too outlandish to be compelling.

Yet director Sean Baker pulls it off with intelligence and emotional depth that elevates what could have been merely provocative into something genuinely meaningful. The real question isn’t whether Anora is worth watching, but whether you’re prepared for what kind of film it is. This isn’t a conventional drama with clear moral heroes.

It’s been described as a “neorealist screwball comedy with an aching heart”—and that description captures both the energy and the emotional weight you’ll encounter. If you appreciate character-driven narratives that refuse easy answers, if you’re willing to sit with complexity and discomfort, if you value filmmaking that takes risks, then Anora deserves your attention.

Table of Contents

• What Do the Awards Tell Us About Anora’s Quality?
• The Gap Between Critical Acclaim and What You’ll Actually Experience
• The Story at the Heart of the Film
• Should You Clear Your Schedule to See This Film?
• The Potential Limitations and When Anora Might Not Be for You
• Sean Baker’s Direction and Filmmaking Innovation
• Anora’s Place in Contemporary Cinema and Beyond

What Do the Awards Tell Us About Anora’s Quality?

The awards recognition surrounding anora reads like a filmmaking masterclass. At the 97th Academy Awards, the film won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Mikey Madison), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.

Sean Baker became the first person ever to win four Academy Awards in a single night for the same film—a historic achievement that reflects how the Academy recognized his contribution across multiple creative dimensions.

Mikey Madison, who carries the film as protagonist Anora, won 46 separate awards for her performance, a remarkable testament to both her work and the film’s impact across international film festivals and critics organizations.

Beyond the Oscars, Anora was ranked the second-best film of 2024 by Sight and Sound magazine, a publication known for rigorous critical standards. The National Board of Review and American Film Institute both included it in their top ten films of 2024. Collider ranked it as the 36th best film of the 2020s in 2025.

These aren’t awards given for spectacle or commercial success—they’re prizes and recognitions that require sustained critical evaluation. The consistency of this recognition across different institutions and critical bodies suggests this isn’t a film that appeals to one narrow audience or critical faction, but rather one that demonstrates multiple types of excellence.

The Gap Between Critical Acclaim and What You’ll Actually Experience

A Metacritic score of 90+ and an IMDb rating of 7.4 communicate that critics and audiences largely agree on Anora’s quality, but these numbers don’t prepare you for the actual experience of watching the film. Anora is structured around prolonged tension and emotional discomfort. There are scenes of genuine cruelty.

There are moments of sharp humor that emerge from situations that are fundamentally tragic. This is not a film designed to make you feel good, though it may make you feel moved.

The warning here is worth stating plainly: if you’re seeking entertainment in the conventional sense—a story that follows predictable emotional beats and resolves with a sense of closure—Anora will frustrate you. The film refuses to provide the satisfaction of a typical story arc.

When Anora’s marriage to the oligarch’s son encounters resistance from his family, you might expect a traditional romantic comedy resolution or a grand gesture of true love.

Instead, Sean Baker uses the collision between Anora’s world and this family’s world to explore deeper questions about power, agency, and whose stories get told as victories. The ending doesn’t provide a neat answer to whether Anora “wins.” That ambiguity is by design, and it’s one reason the film has generated such passionate critical discussion.

The Story at the Heart of the Film

Anora begins in a strip club in Brooklyn where we meet Anora, a young sex worker with a combination of charisma, vulnerability, and hard-earned street intelligence. She meets Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, and after a whirlwind encounter, they marry.

From this setup, the film spirals outward. Vanya’s parents arrive from Russia—not to celebrate the union but to undo it. They view the marriage as a threat to their family’s status and their son’s future.

What follows is a battle of wills between Anora and Vanya’s family, with economic and cultural power as the central tension. The brilliance of this premise lies in how Sean Baker uses it to examine class, power, and the myth of the Cinderella story.

Anora is an anti-Cinderella tale in which the “Prince” doesn’t rescue the heroine from her circumstances. Instead, his family treats her as a threat that must be neutralized. The film takes seriously the question of what Anora actually wants versus what she’s been told she should want.

Mikey Madison’s performance captures this internal conflict with remarkable nuance—moments of bravado give way to moments of genuine fear and need, and the film never lets us settle into a simple reading of who Anora is.

Should You Clear Your Schedule to See This Film?

If you value films that challenge you more than they comfort you, yes, you should see Anora. This is especially true if you’ve been disappointed by recent major releases that prioritize spectacle over substance or rely on established franchises and IP. Anora was distributed by Neon and released theatrically on October 18, 2024.

It had a wide release, meaning you likely have or will have the opportunity to see it in a theater where the cinematography and sound design can fully register. Seeing it on a big screen matters—the film’s New York geography and visual storytelling are designed for cinema.

If you’re hesitating because award-winning films sometimes feel like homework, consider this comparison: Anora isn’t like a David Lynchian puzzle-box that demands repeat viewings to parse. It’s immediately engaging on a scene-to-scene level. The dialogue crackles. The pacing moves. There are scenes that are genuinely funny.

What it asks of you is emotional presence and a willingness to sit with discomfort, not intellectual decryption.

The Potential Limitations and When Anora Might Not Be for You

The central limitation of Anora is that it operates in a register of discomfort and moral ambiguity that not all viewers will appreciate. Some will find the sex work elements and the frank sexuality of the film distasteful rather than illuminating.

Some will feel that the film is too much in Anora’s perspective and doesn’t adequately explore the humanity of Vanya’s family. Some will feel that the film’s critique of power and wealth could have been sharpened or made more explicit. These aren’t failures of the film—they’re deliberate choices that you should enter with awareness.

Another practical limitation: Anora is not a film for those seeking straightforward emotional catharsis. You will not leave the theater feeling that everything has been resolved or that justice has been clearly served.

The film’s final act pushes Anora into a position of vulnerability and helplessness that some viewers experience as powerful and others as punishing. There are scenes of physical violence that, while not gratuitously filmed, are difficult to watch.

If you’re dealing with trauma related to violence or abuse, you might want to check specific content warnings before committing to the film. The beauty of Anora is also sometimes the source of its difficulty.

Sean Baker’s Direction and Filmmaking Innovation

What distinguishes Anora at a technical level is Sean Baker’s approach to naturalism and rhythm. The film uses extended takes and long scenes that allow space for character interaction and dialogue to develop naturally. This is not the frenetic editing style of contemporary mainstream cinema.

Instead, Baker trusts the viewer to stay engaged through the quality of writing and performance.

He shot much of the film using handheld cameras and documentary-style framing, which creates an immediacy and roughness that elevates the realism of the piece. This technical approach is why film editors and cinematographers specifically recognized the work—these aren’t stylistic flourishes but choices that serve the story’s thematic concerns about authenticity and presence.

Baker’s specific innovation was writing a screenplay that moves with the rhythm of classical screwball comedy—quick wit, physical comedy, misunderstanding and collision—while maintaining the emotional weight of drama. The film surprises you by being genuinely funny at moments when you weren’t expecting laughter, and devastating at moments that seemed like they might be comic.

Anora’s Place in Contemporary Cinema and Beyond

Anora has already become something of a modern classic in just the months since its release. Collider’s ranking of it as the 36th best film of the 2020s, made in 2025, suggests that critics are already viewing it as a definitive work of its era.

The film arrives at a moment when prestige cinema feels scattered—some of the year’s biggest acclaimed films play it safer or lean more heavily on spectacle.

Anora stands as an example of what’s possible when a director has complete creative control and brings intelligence and innovation to the format. Looking forward, Anora may influence how films address questions of power, economics, and gender in the 2020s and beyond.

It’s a film that takes seriously the lives and perspectives of characters who are typically sidelined in mainstream cinema. Whether or not you ultimately love the film, it represents cinema operating at a high level of artistic ambition and execution, and that’s worth supporting and engaging with.

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