Anora (USA: Sean Baker, 2024)

Anora (USA: Sean Baker, 2024: 139 mins) 

Baker, Sean and Mikey Madison. "Club Classic: On the accents and improv of their new screwball dramedy Anora." Journal (November 1, 2024)

---. "Sean Baker and Mikey Madison break down Anora’s club scenes." Letterboxd (November 15, 2024)

Bodjoran, Sam. "Under the Table: Sam Bodrojan considers Anora and the emasculated sadism of Sean Baker." Los Angeles Review of Books (January 5, 2025)

Daniels, Drew. "Anora Ignites Bride War." American Cinematographer (March 3, 2025)

Hudson, David. "Anora's Big Night. The Daily (March 3, 2025)

---. "A Second Look at Anora." The Daily (December 11, 2024)

Koski, Genevieve, et al. "Cinde-F***ing-Rella, Pt. 1 — Pretty Woman." The Next Picture Show #451 (November 19, 2024) ["Sean Baker’s new ANORA takes its initial cues from 1990’s PRETTY WOMAN, but its story of a sex worker who develops romantic feelings for a client in spite of class difference and social stigma soon peels off in a vastly different direction. So this week we’re focusing on that shared starting point to determine what makes PRETTY WOMAN both a deeply weird depiction of sex work and a resoundingly successful romcom — and no, it’s not just Julia Roberts, though it’s hard to imagine us discussing PRETTY WOMAN as a classic film today without that star-making performance."]

---. "Cinde-F***ing-Rella, Pt. 2 — Anora." The Next Picture Show #452 (November 26, 2024) ["Sean Baker’s ANORA takes the fairy-tale premise of 1990’s PRETTY WOMAN as its starting point, but ends up on a very different route to a very different sort of happy ending. It’s also a best-of-the year contender for most of us, so we spend some time discussing what makes it so before bringing its romcom predecessor back in to consider how these two films about sex workers falling for their wealthy clients are in conversation when it comes to classicism and social hierarchies, conspicuous consumption, and what happens when a transactional relationship evolves into something more."]

Madison, Mikey. "Mikey Madison (‘Anora’) Enters Her Golden Age." Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso (February 9, 2025) 

Roberts, Risdon. "Heaux Joy." Slant (October 23, 2024) ["I’m a sex worker. Anora is one of the few movies about my profession that doesn’t make me cringe."]

Schuster, Aaron. "The Ethical Dignity of Anora." E-Flux (November 20, 2024) ["Contemporary cinema might congratulate itself on having a harder-hitting approach to capitalism as compared to the saccharine fantasy of Pretty Woman. But today’s highly successful genre of anti-capitalist movies and television is above all pacifying and reassuring: the capitalists are punished, the rich get their comeuppance, and the downtrodden achieve some measure of revenge. Even when this genre displays real genius (particularly in its comedy of manners—the analytic precision with which it dissects the speech and behavior of the hyper-privileged), it still partakes of this impotent morality. Succession, White Lotus, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, Parasite, Saltburn, Industry: one can loathe the rich and love them too. This was put well by Martha Gill: 'We should recognize ‘eat the rich’ TV for what it is: not as any sort of cultural ‘reckoning’ for the prosperous and corrupt, but pure catharsis—a sort of inverted mirror of society. The more violently a culture squishes the undeserving wealthy on screen, the more it tends to valorize them in reality.' Truffaut once said that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film. What about an anti-rich film?"]