Anora

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

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.

Themes

class conflict, sex work, marriage and annulment, romantic delusion, power imbalance, female agency, wealth and exploitation, comedy turning to tragedy

Topics

dark comedy, drama, romance, sex work, class satire, relationship chaos, social realism, New York City, tragicomedy, indie cinema