ANORA

Here's the decision, stated plainly: skip it. ANORA is a well-crafted film — Sean Baker paces the back half with real wit, Mikey Madison shows genuine comic and dramatic range, and the story lands on a final scene that critics and this reviewer both found powerfully emotional. None of that changes what the first half asks you to sit through.

For roughly the movie's first thirty minutes, and intermittently after, ANORA is a nonstop parade of graphic sex, explicit nudity, and drug use, set to a soundtrack of profanity that runs into the hundreds. Prostitution is portrayed as glamorous and consequence-free until the film's very end, when Anora finally breaks down and recognizes how thoroughly she's been used.

That final scene is real. It's also a few honest minutes bolted onto two hours of exploitation. A touching ending doesn't undo what the audience has already absorbed. This one isn't worth your conscience, no matter how the awards season goes.

Anora is a stripper and escort in New York, trading nights of lap dances for cash. When a playful, wealthy young Russian named Ivan hires her to be his exclusive companion for a week of Las Vegas partying, the arrangement turns into something neither of them expected: a spontaneous marriage. But Ivan's family has other plans for his future, and when word reaches his parents that their son has married a sex worker, they send people to undo it — fast.

Three stars means ANORA is genuinely well made — just not well-intentioned. Sean Baker gives the film a frantic, propulsive energy once the plot kicks into gear in its second half, when the search for Ivan turns into something close to slapstick comedy. Mikey Madison anchors it with real comic timing and, in the closing minutes, real dramatic weight. Yura Borisov is quietly excellent as the one kind man in Anora's orbit, and Mark Eydelshteyn brings boyish charm to Ivan whenever he's not simply a body in a sex scene. The film's biggest flaw is length and restraint: at 139 minutes, it could lose twenty minutes by simply cutting its excessive, repetitive early sex scenes — and it would lose nothing else.

ANORA's dominant worldview is, in the source's own words, a very strong pagan one. For most of its runtime, the film treats prostitution as glamorous, hedonism as harmless, and sex without love as simply how people connect. Money buys a week of companionship; drugs fuel the party; nudity and casual sex are the film's default language, not its exception.

In its final minutes, something shifts. Anora breaks down sobbing — not from guilt, but from realizing she has never known how to relate to a man except sexually, and that the one person who showed her real kindness asked nothing of her body. It's a genuine moment of clarity. It isn't repentance, but it's the first honest thing Anora says all movie.

Director Sean Baker has built a career finding empathy for people living exploited lives — trans sex workers, porn performers, now an escort. That instinct has value. But empathy for a person isn't the same as endorsing the world they inhabit, and this film spends two hours immersed in that world before it finally grieves it.

The ache underneath the film is real: the hunger to be known and loved without being used. Scripture names both the ache and its remedy: "for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2:13).

ANORA earns its craft: sharp performances, a propulsive back half, and an ending that genuinely lands. But three good stars can't outweigh a −4 rating built on hundreds of obscenities, near-constant graphic sex and nudity, and drug use played for laughs. Our verdict stands as it opened: skip it. If you're choosing something for family movie night, start with our latest family-friendly picks instead.