Anora – 4K

Anora
2024 – 139 Min.
Criterion – 4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray
2.39:1 Widescreen
Starring Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian 
Written by Sean Baker
Directed by Sean Baker

A low budget/high octane comedy about a working girl named Anora, Sean Baker’s film was a surprise favorite at the 2025 Oscars. Costing around six million dollars, Anora‘s most formidable competition was Dune: Part Two, tipping the scales at 190 million. That evening, Baker, star Mikey Madison, and Anora were giant killers, picking up awards for Best Actress and Best Film while Baker himself won for Best Director, Editing, and Screenplay. Obviously skilled at manufacturing high concept art at bargain basement prices, Baker is the latest proponent of the Roger Corman paradigm: “brilliance on a budget.”

Baker seems to thrive on thrift; his most recent films had been shot on 16 mm (Red Rocket) and an iPhone (Tangerine), but his renegade nature aside, the Academy was not necessarily welcoming insurrectionists into the fold. Though nearly three hours long and featuring more literal bang for your buck than one of Radley Metzger’s glossy skin flicks, Anora is a throwback to Hollywood’s delightfully checkered past—cheeky pre-code entertainments like Baby Face and Night Nurse headlined by feminist powerhouses like Barbara Stanwyck. Though its running time hints at a slog, Anora moves with the wit and clarity of one of those pre-code quickies, a bullet train where the view races by but the details are as crisp and clear as a still life.

Madison plays Anora Mikheeva, or “Ani” as she calls herself at Headquarters, a gentleman’s club where she plays the perfect hostess; stroking a client’s ego with one hand while calculating their bankroll with the other. She’s solicitous in all senses of the word, and if these willful suckers haven’t brought enough cash to join her in the VIP lounge (a back room with flimsy curtains that barely conceal the lap dances), she’s happy—eager, even—to escort them to the nearest ATM. She has the effortlessly choreographed moves of a veteran people-pleaser. It’s a brilliant disguise unless you catch her occasional side-long glance at one of her customers—a black-eyed look of revulsion which is like a window to her soul.

On the subway she is a different person altogether, disappearing into a bulky overcoat, wool hat, and headphones to shut out the world, even though the booming techno and endless pandering of the Headquarters club surely still resonates. Separated from the clients and the other dancers, she is finally herself, a joyless cipher.

Her mood is lifted by the arrival of a hyperactive table-hopper named Ivan Zakharov, aka Vanya. At first he appears to be just another pub crawler looking for a cheap thrill but Anora’s usual waltz turns into a serious tango when she realizes he’s rich—wildly rich—the son of a Russian oligarch. Played by the baby-faced Mark Eydelshteyn, Vanya says he’s twenty-one though he looks seventeen and acts fourteen. Anora is so successful in her seduction that he suggests a week of uninterrupted fun and games at his ritzy waterfront home in Brooklyn’s Mill Basin, seven days of house parties that culminate in a Vegas getaway. There Vanya proposes a side trip to a local chapel and Anora, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel that she lives in, is a quick “yes.” The newlyweds return to Brooklyn where their sex and video game lifestyle continues at warp speed. Then the Russians show up.

The audience will realize the first 45 minutes of Anora has been a set-up, a parody of the rom-com form complete with dreadful happy-together music, carefully composed fireworks, and very expensive wedding rings. That ring is the first thing that Anora loses when Vanya’s custodians arrive, Toros, Igor, and Garnik. Toros (Karren Karagulian) is Vanya’s long-suffering godfather, Igor (Yura Borisov) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) are Toro’s reluctant enforcers.

The second thing Anora loses is Vanya himself who escapes his would-be captors, leaving the bride to fend for herself. A biting, kicking, screaming reincarnation of Lupe Vélez and Tura Satana, Anora is a worthy adversary for Igor and Garnik but she’s outmatched by the implacable if sympathetic strongmen. Taming Anora is one thing, now Igor and Garnik must find Vanya and return him to his parents—in particular his mother who is right now winging her way from Russia like the Wicked Witch of the West aiming for the Emerald City.

Ever the democratic art form, cinema has fostered a long, empathic relationship with one of the more marginalized segments of the American labor force: sex workers. 1933’s If I Had a Million starred Wynne Gibson as a weary escort given one million dollars and a chance to finally sleep alone; in Nights of Cabiria, Giulietta Masina loses everything but musters a smile in the face of utter betrayal, Klute leaves a hardboiled Jane Fonda with a glimmer of hope. Baker breaks with that formula—Anora’s immediate future is left in limbo but all signs point to a return engagement at Headquarters. With her commanding performance Mikey Madison is in the driver’s seat of Baker’s streamlined sex comedy, but for Ani it’s a bullet train to nowhere. 

Criterion’s new Blu ray release features three discs, one with the 4K version, the other a standard Blu ray, and a third disc containing some well-produced extras. Both transfers of this 2024 release are, as to be expected, immaculate; the standard Blu ray shines but the 4K has the edge with its rich, film-like quality.

There are two audio commentaries, one featuring Baker, producers Alex Coco and Samantha Quan, and cinematographer Drew Daniels. The second commentary features Baker and his five memorable protagonists, Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, and Vache Tovmasyan.

Other supplements include a new making-of documentary that follows Baker and his tiny crew in a day by day video diary documenting the production, and a new interview with Baker who talks shop and his influences, from Cabiria to color schemes (the interiors of the Headquarters club and Anora’s scarlet scarf hark back to Godard’s red-saturated Contempt and Soledad Miranda’s crimson bandana in Vampyros Lesbos). Other items of interest are an interview with Madison, the Cannes Film Festival press conference, and audition footage. Inside the keep case are two print essays from film critic Dennis Lim, and author and Trailers From Hell! guru Kier-La Janisse, who gives us a cook’s tour of Hollywood’s longtime infatuation with sex workers and their world.