Sean Baker's 'Anora' won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the Best Picture Oscar, and has critics using words like 'generation-defining.' But a huge portion of audiences who actually watched it walked away confused, bored, or even angry. So which is it — a genuine work of cinematic art, or a case of the film world crowning something because it feels smart to?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentmy wife and i watched it together and she cried and i pretended i wasn't crying. we didn't talk for like 20 minutes after it ended. that's a masterpiece by any definition
I went in expecting to be bored because of all the hype and came out absolutely wrecked. The last ten minutes of that film are some of the most emotionally honest cinema I've seen in years. Yura Borisov's face alone deserves an entire university course.
The ending absolutely destroyed me and I'm not someone who cries at films. Something about watching someone finally allow themselves to feel something real after spending the whole film performing... I don't have words. I just sat there.
I'm a sex worker and I genuinely cannot explain how much it meant to watch a film where the main character isn't punished for her profession by the narrative. She's just a PERSON. That alone makes it important regardless of whether you think it's 'technically' great.
What strikes me about the debate around this film is that the people who dislike it almost always describe the plot and the people who love it almost always describe how it made them feel. That tells you everything about what kind of film it is.
Mikey Madison should have won Best Actress at the Oscars. She carried every single scene on her back and her performance gets more impressive the more you think about it. The physicality alone is extraordinary.
Sean Baker has been making films like this for 20 years and only got mainstream attention when he finally got a big enough budget. Tangerine was shot on an iPhone and hit just as hard. The man knows exactly what he's doing.
The fact that a film about a sex worker from Brighton Beach won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2025 is genuinely shocking when you think about it historically. Whatever you think of the film itself, that's a meaningful cultural moment.
The film is fundamentally about the American delusion that love and hard work can conquer class. Ani believes she can will her way into a fairy tale through sheer force of personality. And she can't. That's not a feel-good message and I respect Baker enormously for not softening it.
I watched it specifically because of the backlash to the hype and honestly the backlash crowd was completely wrong. It earns every bit of its runtime. If you're bored it's because you're watching the surface and not what's underneath.
Hot take but Yura Borisov actually gave the best performance in the film and he barely speaks English. The way he communicates everything through body language is extraordinary and should be studied in acting schools.
genuinely one of the best performances by anyone in anything in years and its being overshadowed by the awards discourse. just watch the film and let it happen to you, stop trying to decide in advance whether its worthy
The pacing in the second act is a genuine problem and nobody wants to admit it because the ending redeems everything. That's not a masterpiece, that's a good film with an exceptional final act.
Can we talk about how it handles class way more honestly than most 'serious' American films? It doesn't moralize. It doesn't preach. It just shows you the machinery and lets you sit with it. That restraint is harder to pull off than it looks.
my mum is Russian and she laughed so hard at the Russian characters she had to pause it twice. she said it's the first Hollywood adjacent film that actually made Russian people feel like real people rather than cartoon villains. that's gotta count for something
I think people who didn't connect with it simply haven't experienced a relationship where the power imbalance was that extreme and that invisible until it was too late. It's not a film you understand from the outside.
The Palme d'Or has been given to objectively worse films than this. People forget Parasite also got it and everyone acted shocked that a 'genre' film could win. The festival circuit is not as elitist as people think, sometimes they just pick the best film.
Sean Baker has NEVER made a bad film. Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket — the man bats 1.000. At some point you just trust the director. Anora being great is unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention.
the russian oligarch comedy sections in the middle are genuinely some of the funniest scenes in any film this decade and nobody talks about this enough. people act like it's a somber arthouse tragedy the whole way through and it's NOT
The Florida Project made me feel the same way and it didn't win anything major. So honestly maybe Anora winning is just Baker finally getting what he always deserved and the credit is being assigned to the wrong film. Still great though.
Genuinely confused what film everyone else watched. I sat through two hours waiting for something to happen and by the time the ending came I was too checked out to care. Not every slow film is profound, sometimes it's just slow.
I work in Brighton and the amount of times a customer has mentioned this film in the last three weeks is unreal. It's crossed over in a way indie films almost never do. That cultural penetration matters and means something.
I actually fell asleep the first time I watched it. Rewatched it the next day and it completely changed. Some films need you to meet them halfway and I wasn't in the right headspace the first time. My fault, not the film's.
Awards voters love films about the American dream failing. They always have. Anora fits perfectly into that tradition so of course it won. Doesn't mean it's bad, just means we should be clear-eyed about why it won.
it won the oscars because academy voters wanted to feel edgy and cool. same as always. the film is fine, its not transcendent
Overrated and I said what I said. There are twenty films from last year that deserved that Oscar more and didn't get it because they weren't quirky enough or didn't have a compelling enough filmmaker backstory. The industry rewards narrative not quality.
it literally won Best Picture. how are people still asking if it deserved awards. it won them. that IS the awards.
indie darling that fooled critics. calling it now. in 10 years nobody will be talking about this the same way they talk about films that genuinely deserve the legacy treatment
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Netflix's 'Adolescence' shows a teenage boy becoming a killer — did the show actually get modern boyhood right, or did it miss the point entirely?
109 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Are dating apps genuinely harder for men or for women?
108 comments