Sean Baker's 'Anora' swept the Palme d'Or and a stack of Oscars, and the discourse has barely cooled down. Some say it's a raw, electric portrait of class and survival that no other film dared to make — others say it's a critic-bait indie that real audiences found exhausting and hollow. Which side are you on?
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Add your commentanyone who thinks this film is critic bait has not actually sat with the ending. like genuinely. the ending reframes EVERYTHING that came before it. it's not a quirky indie romp. it's a tragedy disguised as a comedy and it hit me like a truck.
all i know is i left the theater and sat in my car for 20 minutes and texted my sister something i'd been meaning to say for a long time. make of that what you will about whether the film works.
ok so I actually worked in a strip club for two years while finishing my degree and the way this film depicts the transactional warmth — the way you perform closeness — is more accurate than anything I've seen on screen. It's not exploitative. It's just true.
I sobbed. I never sob at films. I'm a 43-year-old man who sat in a cinema in Glasgow on a Tuesday afternoon and sobbed at the ending of Anora. I don't have a smart analytical take. I'm just reporting that it happened and that it mattered to me.
Yura Borisov alone deserves every award on the planet. The scene at the end where he's just sitting with her in the car — no words, nothing — I genuinely had to pause the film and collect myself. That is what cinema is for.
My honest opinion after watching it three times: it's a top-10 film of the 2020s so far. Baker understood something that almost no filmmaker does right now — that you can make a film about someone in a precarious situation without making it poverty porn or a rescue fantasy. She saves herself. That matters.
I watched it at home alone at midnight after a brutal shift and I had to pause it twice because I was crying too hard to see the screen. I don't care what critics think. I don't care what 'real audiences' think. It found me and I'll carry it.
The class politics angle is only overstated if you've never been on Anora's side of that equation. I grew up really poor and watching her navigate spaces where she fundamentally doesn't belong and everyone knows it — that's not just a plot point, that's every family gathering I went to after marrying into money.
The scene in the car at the end destroyed me. I've been that person. Not in that specific situation but — the moment when someone does something unexpectedly kind and you just fall apart because you've been holding it together so long. Baker understood something real.
I'll tell you what I know for certain. My sixteen-year-old daughter watched this on streaming, texted me immediately afterward, and said 'mom this film is about you when you were young.' I don't know what she meant exactly. I'm not sure I want to. But that film opened a conversation between us that we'd never had. Tell me that's not worth something.
The real question nobody is asking: would this film have won anything if it were directed by a woman? I'm not accusing Baker of anything. I'm asking a structural question about whose gaze gets validated when the subject is a woman's body and survival.
I find it genuinely fascinating that so many men in these comment sections are more comfortable analyzing the film's 'structural flaws' than sitting with the discomfort of what it's actually about. Wonder why that is.
That's an unfair read. I'm a woman, I loved the film, AND I think the middle third has pacing issues. Both things can be true without it being some kind of avoidance mechanism.
Hot take back at you: Mikey Madison was exactly THAT good and the 'carried by the script' argument is something people say about women's performances specifically and almost never about men's. Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler 'used the script well' too. We don't dock him for it.
139 minutes is literally not that long. Mad Max Fury Road is 120 and nobody complains. Oppenheimer is 3 hours and people watched it twice in IMAX. The 'too long' criticism is selective and usually means 'I wasn't enjoying myself enough to forget the runtime'
okay but Fury Road doesn't have a single slow scene. Anora has at least four. runtime is not the issue, pacing is. those are different things.
Confidently stating that Mikey Madison got 'carried by the script' when she improvised a significant portion of her performance is the kind of take that tells me someone has not done even five minutes of reading about how this film was made.
The Cinderella comparison a few comments up is actually more interesting than it sounds, because the whole POINT is that Anora believes she's IN a Cinderella story and the film systematically dismantles that fantasy in real time. It's not the same plot — it's a deconstruction of that plot. Calling it derivative because it references a fairy tale structure is like calling Get Out derivative because it's about a fish out of water.
The framing of 'real audiences' vs 'critics' in the question is doing a lot of ideological work. Real audiences also loved Transformers 4. 'Real audiences' is not a quality metric. It's a rhetorical move.
This. Thank you. The populist framing of art discourse where 'real people' are positioned against elitist critics is itself a kind of manipulation. Films can be challenging AND good. Those aren't opposites.
Watched it twice. First time I thought it was messy and overlong. Second time I realized the mess IS the point. Anora is chaos because her whole life has been chaos. Baker is one of the few directors working today who actually respects people who are struggling.
I genuinely cannot decide if the ending is hopeful or devastating and I've been thinking about it for three weeks. I've read probably fifteen interpretations. I think the fact that I'm still turning it over in my head, still feeling something when I think about her face in that last moment, is the answer to whether this film deserved its awards. I don't need another argument. I just needed to say that.
i worked as a dancer for three years in my early twenties and i have never — NEVER — seen a film that got the specific emotional texture of that life right. not the violence of it necessarily, just the constant calculation. who is worth my time, who is wasting it, how do i get out. Anora lives inside that math 24/7 and Baker somehow filmed it without ever making her feel like a symbol of anything. she's just a person trying.
The fact that it won Best Picture at the Oscars while something like Conclave or The Brutalist was nominated tells me the Academy made the right call for once in about fifteen years. It's the most alive film in the whole lineup.
I genuinely don't understand the 'exhausting' criticism. You want cinema to be comfortable? Go watch a Marvel film. Art that exhausts you is doing something.
Films disappear because studios don't fund conversation around them long-term. Nothing to do with quality. Vertigo was considered a flop. Now it's number one on the Sight & Sound list. Your 2027 prediction means absolutely nothing.
honestly the people saying 'it'll be forgotten' always say that. they said it about Parasite. they said it about Everything Everywhere. eventually you'd think they'd notice the pattern
Comparing this to Parasite is wild to me. Parasite had actual architecture — every scene built on the last. Anora meanders. I liked it fine but the comparison is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Sean Baker has been doing this work for 20 years with barely any resources. Tangerine was shot on an iPhone. The Florida Project almost didn't get distribution. The awards aren't critics falling for a trend — they're finally catching up to a filmmaker who's been right all along.
The Florida Project is a genuinely better film and I will die on this hill. Baker somehow found MORE warmth there with less experience. Anora is technically accomplished but colder. Anyone who disagrees has to explain the Moonee scenes to me with a straight face.
I think both can be excellent without one needing to be 'better'. But yes The Florida Project ending is top 10 cinema endings of the 21st century and I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise
I find it interesting that most of the 'it's overlong' takes seem to come from people who had no problem with the runtime of Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon. Three hours for a historical epic is 'epic.' Two hours and nineteen minutes for a film about a sex worker is 'indulgent.' Ask yourself why.
i showed this to my mum who never watches indie films and she cried at the end and said it reminded her of decisions she made when she was young. that's the test for me. if it reaches someone who has zero interest in film culture, it's the real thing.
Genuinely curious: what does it mean for a film to be 'critic bait'? Because every film I've seen described that way by regular viewers turns out to be... a good film that requires attention. Is the bait just... quality?
No, critic bait is specifically films that perform depth rather than achieve it. Slow burn with no payoff. Elliptical dialogue that mistakes vagueness for profundity. Heavy-handed symbolism dressed up as restraint. I've seen plenty of them and Anora is borderline but I'd say it earns its reputation, barely.
'Earns its reputation, barely' might be the most backhanded compliment in this entire thread and I respect it enormously
I'm from Brighton originally and moved to NYC. I work in a restaurant in midtown and half my coworkers have either seen this or know someone who lives the life it portrays. It's not a fantasy version of sex work — it's just honest. That honesty SCARED people.
The Cinderella comparison is lazy and you know it. Cinderella doesn't end with the prince being annulled and the girl crying in a car with a man who can't fix anything for her. The whole point is that the fairy tale DOESN'T work. That's not Cinderella. That's the anti-Cinderella.
I've noticed that films about working class women's survival get called 'raw and electric' when they win prizes and 'poverty porn' when they don't. The quality of the film barely enters the equation. The label depends almost entirely on institutional validation. Something to sit with.
I've been a film critic for eleven years and I'll be honest: there is absolutely a phenomenon where a film arrives at the right festival moment with the right political texture and the critical apparatus amplifies it beyond what a cold-eyed viewing might justify. I'm not saying that happened here. I'm saying it happens and we should be allowed to ask the question.
That's actually intentional though?? He's not supposed to be a full person because to the system around him he's never HAD to be. His parents treat him like a child, Anora treats him like a lottery ticket, his friends treat him like a boss. Nobody in the film sees him clearly either.
Yura Borisov carrying that film physically — the way he occupies space, the way he eats, the way he holds a phone call — is a masterclass in what you can do when you stop trying to 'act' and start trying to exist on screen. More film schools should use his performance as a teaching text.
The Yura Borisov hype is completely earned. What I find interesting is that he barely speaks English and yet his performance is the most emotionally articulate thing in the whole film. Acting truly is a physical language.
The ending is not ambiguous. People keep calling it ambiguous because they don't want to accept what it's actually saying, which is devastating and unresolvable. There's no interpretation where things are okay. The ambiguity is a defense mechanism.
I disagree with this actually. The final image is deliberately held long enough to allow the viewer to project. Baker is not closing the door. He's leaving it ajar. That's not ambiguity as avoidance — it's ambiguity as respect for the audience's emotional experience.
I'll say it plainly: the Academy giving Best Picture to anything with 'sex worker protagonist' in the pitch document is still surprising to me in 2024. Not because of the subject matter — because of how historically conservative that body is. That alone tells you this film had something undeniable going for it.
nah the Academy gave it because it's the kind of film where every screener feels smart for liking it. it's got edge but not TOO much edge. it's transgressive but still legible. that's the sweet spot for Oscar bait, always has been
People said the same thing about Tangerine in 2015. Baker's films have a way of quietly accumulating importance over time rather than burning bright and fading. I'd take that bet.
I went in expecting to be annoyed — I'd been hearing 'masterpiece' for months and that word is exhausting — and instead I just watched a great film. Not a masterpiece. A great film. The bar had been set impossibly high by the discourse and somehow it still mostly cleared it. That's actually impressive.
Sean Baker deserves enormous credit but let's also talk about the cinematography. Shooting Brighton Beach and those New York interiors with that kind of warmth and grain — it looked like a memory even while it was happening. Genuinely beautiful work.
I work with people experiencing housing insecurity in New York and I've had three different clients mention this film to me in the last two months. That's not nothing. That's a film reaching people who are actually living something adjacent to what's on screen. Critics didn't manufacture that.
I run a small film club and we screened this last month. The room was completely split. Three people loved it, three people were bored out of their minds by the middle section, and one person walked out. That range of reactions tells you this is real art, not manufactured prestige.
The gaze question being raised above is exactly right and nobody wants to engage with it seriously. When a man films a woman's survival and sexuality and it gets celebrated as 'raw honesty,' we should at minimum ask who gets to define what raw honesty looks like on screen. That's not cancel culture. That's just film studies 101.
okay but Andrea Arnold made Fish Tank in 2009 and it hit almost identical notes — working class girl, older man, disillusionment, devastating ending — and it won the Cannes jury prize and people STILL don't talk about it the way they talk about Anora. so yeah. the gaze thing is real.
The thing that gets me is how people keep calling it 'critic bait' as if critics are this monolithic hivemind that decided together to love something mediocre. Critics disagreed with each other constantly about this film. The consensus emerged because the film earned it, not because some cabal decided to anoint it.
Because the awards determine which films get funding, distribution, and follow-up opportunities. 'It's just marketing' ignores the material consequences for the filmmakers and the kinds of stories that get told next. Anora winning means more films like Anora get made. That's not nothing.
I think people who call it critic bait are accidentally admitting they only trust films that are comfortable. Anora is SUPPOSED to make you squirm. The discomfort is the whole point of the exercise.
The issue I keep coming back to is: who is this film FOR? Not in a dismissive way. Genuinely. Because it's too raw for casual audiences, too genre-adjacent for pure art house crowds, and too American for European festival voters to champion on purely formalist grounds. It exists in this weird middle space that I think is actually where the best films live.
The arm's length thing is the POINT though. Anora doesn't let people close because people being close to her has always ended badly. The film replicates her defensive structure in the viewer's relationship to her. You feel the distance because she needs the distance. Calling it a flaw misreads it as an accident.
The Palme d'Or going to an American film about a sex worker felt like Cannes trying to prove it's still edgy and relevant. I'm not saying the film is bad, I'm saying the conversation around it has been completely out of proportion to what's actually on screen.
My film professor called it the best American film since Moonlight and I think that's almost right but not quite. It's the best American film about economic precarity since Beasts of the Southern Wild. Different category. Both matter.
What nobody mentions is how FUNNY it is. Like genuinely laugh out loud funny in places. The scene where everyone is trying to track down Yura and nothing works and they're all just standing there looking useless — I was crying laughing. Critics get so serious about serious films that they forget to mention when they're also hilarious.
The Brutalist is three and a half hours of a man suffering photographed beautifully. Anora is a woman being failed by every system that should protect her, depicted with specificity and wit. I love both but one of them is about a person I've never met and one is about people I've worked alongside. The Academy made the emotionally correct choice.
Can we stop ranking films against each other as if cinema is a competition? Both films exist. Both are good. The awards are a marketing mechanism, not a verdict on artistic worth. Why do we let them define which films we're allowed to value?
Overlong. Could have been 90 minutes and been a masterpiece. At 139 minutes it's a very good film with a saggy middle that Baker clearly fell too in love with to cut. Someone needed to be braver in the editing room.
The class politics ARE overstated and here's why: the film presents Anora as more emotionally intelligent than literally every wealthy character but then traps her anyway, which is actually a very comfortable liberal fantasy. It tells rich audiences they're watching something subversive while confirming that the system is unchangeable. That's not radical filmmaking. That's reassurance dressed as radicalism.
Okay but there is a real social phenomenon where critics amplify each other's enthusiasm at festivals and a consensus forms before the film has been seen by a general audience. Saying that isn't an attack on individual critics. It's describing how the system works. The first Variety review shapes the next ten reviews shapes the jury conversation.
My film theory professor showed this in class last week and what struck me in the discussion afterward was how few of my classmates had noticed that almost every scene of supposed intimacy in the first act is also a transaction. Nothing is free. That accumulation makes the ending's specific sadness make total sense. Baker architectures it perfectly.
Fair point technically but the critical consensus absolutely shapes awards momentum. You know this. A film can have jury and Academy support precisely because the critical atmosphere around it is so overwhelming. These systems don't operate in a vacuum.
What nobody is discussing: the sound design. That apartment party sequence in the first act — the bass, the laughter bleeding into the next scene, the way quiet moments feel genuinely fragile because you've been conditioned to expect noise. It's doing enormous emotional work and it's completely invisible. That's craft. That's not an accident.
The 'real audiences' vs critics framing in this debate drives me insane because it assumes critics aren't real people who have real emotional responses. I know several professional critics. They are not robots validating ideology. They sat in a dark room and felt things and then wrote about them. That's it.
Critics love films about marginalized communities when a prestige director is holding the camera. The same story directed by someone without Baker's festival pedigree would never have gotten within a mile of Cannes. Make of that what you will.
I keep seeing people say the middle section drags and I genuinely want to understand what film they were watching. That extended chase sequence through Brighton Beach had me holding my breath for twenty minutes straight. That's not dragging. That's sustained tension built from almost nothing.
Revisiting this in 2027 sounds like a fun experiment actually. My prediction: it will be remembered the way Fish Tank and Tangerine are remembered — beloved by people who care about cinema, unknown to everyone else. Which is fine. That's a real legacy. Not everything needs to be Star Wars.
The take that Yura will be forgotten is genuinely baffling to me. He was in a film that won the Palme d'Or and four Oscars. His agent's phone has not stopped ringing. Whatever you think of Anora, it has launched this man into a completely different tier of international cinema. The cultural conversation may move on but careers don't forget.
The Brutalist should have won Best Picture and I know that's not a popular opinion here but I'm leaving it anyway. Anora is good. The Brutalist is a once-in-a-generation achievement. The Academy picked the more immediately likable film over the more important one, as they almost always do.
Hot take: Mikey Madison was good but not THAT good. She got carried by the script and the supporting cast. The Academy was clearly just in the mood for something scrappy and indie after years of prestige biopics.
I screened this for my university class on contemporary cinema and the most interesting responses came from students who'd never encountered the Brighton Beach Russian community before. Total unfamiliarity made them watch it more carefully. Sometimes not knowing the world depicted is an asset.
The editing conversation is the one that film people should be having instead of 'did it deserve to win.' The rhythm of this film is genuinely unusual — it slows down when you expect it to speed up and accelerates at moments of supposed stillness. That's the editor's achievement and it barely gets mentioned.
Calling it 'cold' compared to The Florida Project is actually my exact feeling and I couldn't articulate why until I read that comment. Something is held at arm's length. I cared about Anora but I never loved her the way I loved Moonee and I think that's a deliberate choice that cost the film some of its potential emotional impact.
Just to be factually accurate: the Palme d'Or is voted on by a jury, not critics. And the Oscar is voted by Academy members, not the press. So the whole 'critics fell in love with it' framing in the question doesn't even hold up logically.
The Florida Project comparison gets exhausting because people use it as a cudgel to diminish whatever Baker does next. Every director who makes something great gets haunted by it forever. Let the man make different things.
genuine question: does anyone else feel like the awards conversation actively made you like the film less? i saw it before the Oscar nominations came out and thought it was great. then the hype machine started and by the time it won i was almost annoyed at it for winning. that's completely irrational and i know it's my problem. but the discourse poisoned something for me and i resent that.
The Russian oligarch kid character was the weakest link for me. He felt like a plot device more than a person. I never believed him as a real human being for a single second of the film.
This is the most interesting critique in this whole thread and I'm annoyed nobody has engaged with it properly. The question of whether 'the system is hopeless' stories actually challenge power or just aestheticize it is a serious one.
Or maybe not every film about an unjust system has to end with the protagonist winning? Are we only allowed to make films where poor people triumph? That feels like its own kind of condescension.
The cinematography comment above is valid but I'd push back slightly — some of those handheld sequences felt like affectation rather than style. Like Baker was imitating the Dardennes without fully committing to their rigor. Beautiful in stills, occasionally chaotic in motion.
Honestly the whole class politics angle is kinda overstated. Rich boy marries poor girl, rich family disapproves, things go badly. This plot has existed since Cinderella. I don't understand why people are treating it like some grand revelation.
The humor is kind of the whole mechanism though. You're laughing and then suddenly you're not and you don't know when it switched on you. That's incredibly hard to pull off and Baker makes it look almost accidental which means it was incredibly deliberate.
this is such a bad faith argument lmao. people complained about BOTH of those films being too long. the runtime complaint is not specific to films about women or poor people. some films are just too long. its allowed.
I respect Baker's commitment to his subjects but I do wonder how much of the authenticity is real and how much is aesthetic choices that signal authenticity to festival audiences. Grain filter and handheld camera do not equal truth.
This is true of every cultural institution including the stock market. Collective momentum is not the same as corruption or delusion. Sometimes the thing the crowd goes crazy for is actually that good.
ngl i tried to watch it twice and both times fell asleep around the hour mark. not saying its bad. saying its just not for me. the people calling it a masterpiece and the people calling it critic bait are both wrong. its a good film that some people love and some people find boring. thats it thats the whole debate
Multiple interviews with Baker and Madison both discuss the improvisational approach, the minimal rehearsal, the way scenes were allowed to go off-script. It's well documented. Start with the Vulture profile from January.
Confidently stating this: the Palme d'Or hasn't meant anything since Parasite. Before you @ me — Parasite was genuinely the last time that jury got it unambiguously right. Everything since has been the jury rewarding whatever felt most urgent in the room on the day.
Parasite won in 2019, so your argument is that the award has been meaningless for six years? Titane won in 2021. The Zone of Interest won in 2023. You're going to sit there and tell me those don't belong in any serious conversation about contemporary cinema? I'll take your hot take and throw it directly in the bin.
Films like this win big awards and then disappear from the cultural conversation within six months. Let's revisit this thread in 2027 and see if anyone is still talking about Anora. I'll bet you they're not.
OK so I dragged my boyfriend to see this and he spent the whole drive home complaining it was 'just a vibe' with no real story. And I couldn't even argue because he's not wrong that the plot is thin. But I also couldn't explain why I was still thinking about it four days later and he'd already forgotten it. Some films aren't about their plots. I don't know how to make that argument to someone who needs a plot.
unpopular opinion but the film peaked in the first 30 minutes and never got back to that energy
Respectfully, I think you're confusing peak energy with peak comfort. The film is deliberately structured to strip away the fun. That's a choice, not a failure.
critic bait. full stop. i saw it in a theater with like 40 people and by the end half of them were on their phones. real audiences vote with their attention and this film lost.
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