Anora Review

Baker builds the film in three movements and never announces the joins. The first hour is a giddy fantasy shot in neon and shot glasses, the middle is a farce in which three incompetent enforcers wreck a mansion trying to restrain one furious woman, and the last stretch is a quiet drive through Brighton Beach that reframes everything before it. Mikey Madison is extraordinary. Ani is loud, funny and armored, and the performance keeps showing you the calculation behind the bravado without ever asking to be liked.

Yura Borisov, playing the least stupid of the henchmen, does most of his work in silence. The dialogue is filthy and precise, and the comic timing through the mansion sequence is as good as American film has managed in years. The reservations are modest and mostly about length, since the middle act circles a few beats longer than it needs to. The final scene settles the argument, a small gesture that lands hard because the film has spent two hours refusing to be sentimental. It swept the major awards and the reasons are all on screen.