Anora

Anora is Sean Baker's most ambitious and accomplished film, a furious romantic comedy that transforms into something far more devastating as it hurtles toward its conclusion. Mikey Madison delivers a star-making performance as Ani, a dancer at a Coney Island strip club who speaks Russian and catches the eye of Ivan, the feckless twentysomething son of a wealthy oligarch. Their whirlwind courtship and impulsive Vegas marriage plays like a modern Cinderella story until the clock strikes midnight in the form of Igor and Toros, enforcers dispatched to make the problem disappear.

What makes the film extraordinary is Baker's refusal to let any character become a type. Mark Eydelshteyn's Ivan is neither villain nor victim but something more recognizably human: a rich kid who genuinely likes Ani but lacks the spine to defy his family. Yura Borisov, as the quiet enforcer Igor, gives a performance of extraordinary tenderness hidden beneath professional detachment. The film's central section, a chaotic night-long chase across Brighton Beach, is simultaneously the funniest and most anxiety-inducing sequence in recent American cinema.

The final shot of Anora will be debated for years. Baker earns it through meticulous accumulation of detail: every transaction, every power dynamic, every moment where money determines who gets to have feelings. The film understands that the American dream and the American hustle are the same thing, and that the people who work hardest are the ones least likely to keep what they earn.