Anora

Anora is a 2024 American romantic comedy-drama film written, directed, produced, and edited by Sean Baker. It stars Mikey Madison as Anora "Ani" Mikheeva, a stripper from New York who marries the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch played by Mark Eydelshteyn. The supporting cast includes Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Darya Ekamasova, and Aleksei Serebryakov.
Anora premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2024, where it received critical acclaim and won the Palme d'Or. It was released theatrically on October 18, 2024, by Neon. The film grossed $56.6 million worldwide against a $6 million budget, making it Baker's highest-grossing film.
Anora received numerous accolades. The film was named one of the top ten films of 2024 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. The film received six nominations at the 97th Academy Awards, winning five for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Madison), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. It also received seven nominations at the 78th British Academy Film Awards, winning two, and five nominations at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards.
Anora "Ani" Mikheeva, a 23-year-old stripper, lives in Brighton Beach, a Russian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City. Her boss introduces her to Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov, the 21-year-old son of the Russian oligarch Nikolai Zakharov, who requests someone fluent in Russian. Though Vanya is in the U.S. to study, he spends most of his time partying in clubs and playing video games in his lavish Brooklyn mansion.
Vanya hires Anora for several sexual encounters. He invites her to a New Year’s Eve party at the mansion, and the following morning, he offers her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for a week. During the week, Anora parties with Vanya and his friends, and they all go on an extravagant trip to Las Vegas. At the end of the trip, Vanya reveals that he has to return to Russia permanently to work at his father’s company and expresses disdain for his parents. He suggests that he will not have to leave if he marries an American and impulsively proposes marriage. Anora is reluctant at first but agrees after Vanya assures her that his feelings are genuine. They elope at a Vegas wedding chapel. Vanya then buys her a large wedding ring and an expensive fur coat. She resigns from her job and moves into Vanya's mansion. When news of their marriage reaches Russia, Vanya's mother, Galina, orders his Armenian godfather, Toros, to find them and arrange an annulment while she and Nikolai fly to the U.S.
Toros sends his henchmen, Garnik and Igor, to the mansion. They inform Vanya that his parents are taking him back to Russia and enrage Anora by calling her a prostitute, suggesting Vanya only married her for a green card. Vanya flees the premises, and Anora engages in a violent struggle with Garnik and Igor before they restrain her. When Toros arrives, he tells Anora that Vanya’s mansion and wealth belong to his parents and that he is financially dependent on them. He confiscates her wedding ring, gags her, and offers her $10,000 for the annulment. Anora insists she and Vanya are in love, but she agrees to help find him.
Anora, Toros, Garnik, and Igor search Brooklyn. Anora learns from friends that Vanya is at her former strip club, where he is being entertained by Diamond, a rival dancer. They drag Vanya out of the club, but he is too intoxicated to listen to them, and the group is forced to wait outside the courthouse overnight. The annulment is dismissed since the marriage took place in Nevada.
At the airport, Anora introduces herself to Nikolai and Galina in Russian, but Galina rejects her. Conceding to his parents, Vanya coldly tells Anora their marriage must end while Galina orders everyone onto a plane to Las Vegas. Having not signed a prenuptial agreement, Anora pledges to file for a divorce settlement, but Galina threatens her with financial ruin if she does not comply. Realizing Vanya's cowardice and his family's power, Anora signs the annulment papers. Igor suggests Vanya apologize, but Galina objects. Anora insults both Vanya and Galina before leaving, telling Galina that Vanya only got married to spite her.
Igor takes Anora back to New York to collect her belongings. At the mansion, she confronts Igor about their encounter, accusing him of assault and saying he would have raped her if they had been alone, Igor assures her he is simply not a rapist and had no intention of doing so. The next morning, Igor gives Anora the money Toros promised her and drives her home. In the car, he returns her wedding ring as a token of goodwill. Moved by the gesture, Anora initiates sex with him but stops when he tries to kiss her; she breaks down and sobs in his arms.
The director, Sean Baker, said Anora was inspired by a story from a friend about a Russian-American newlywed kidnapped for collateral. He was also inspired by his work in 2000 and 2001, when he edited wedding videos, including ones of Russian-Americans in New York. Baker said his intentions were towards "telling human stories, by telling stories that are hopefully universal [...] It's helping remove the stigma that's been applied to [sex work], that's always been applied to this livelihood." Baker hired Andrea Werhun, a Canadian writer and actress known for her 2018 memoir Modern Whore about her prior time as a sex worker, as a creative consultant.
Baker cast Mikey Madison after seeing her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and Scream (2022). He hired Madison without an audition. Madison learned Russian, visited strip clubs, and studied the Brooklyn accent to prepare. Although some media outlets incorrectly reported that Anora Mikheeva was Uzbek-American, Baker said that Anora "is of Russian ethnicity" and "from one of the post-Soviet countries".
Principal photography took place starting in February 2023 in Brooklyn, including the neighborhoods of Brighton Beach, Coney Island, and Sheepshead Bay. Anora was filmed over 37 days, with the 25-minute home invasion scene taking 10 days. It was shot on Kodak 35 mm film framed in 4-perf widescreen anamorphic using an Arricam LT, with color correction completed via DaVinci Resolve at FotoKem. Vintage LOMO prime and zoom lenses were mainly used for filming, while Atlas Orion lenses were used for low-light scenes. Scenes were also shot at the Palms Casino Resort and on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. The film's cinematography was inspired by 1970s crime dramas set in New York, including The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Alex Coco, one of the producers, worked as a disc jockey for the music in the scenes in the club. Baker is credited with the casting, with the cast including more than 30 different speaking parts.
For the Zakharov mansion, Baker filmed at 2458 National Drive, a Mill Basin mansion once owned by Vasily Anisimov, an oligarch with ties to Russia. Baker had searched on Google for "the biggest and best mansion in Brighton Beach". To learn more about the area, Baker and Mikey Madison temporarily moved to southern Brooklyn during pre-production. Toros and Ani's search for Vanya was filmed in several restaurants and clubs that the producers had frequented.
At a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, Madison said that Baker and the producer Samantha Quan, Baker's wife, would act out different sex positions to demonstrate what they wanted the actors to do. Madison was offered an intimacy coordinator, but said: "As I'd already created a really comfortable relationship with both of them for about a year, I felt that that would be where I was most comfortable with and it ended up working so perfectly."
The soundtrack includes Robin Schulz rework of "Greatest Day" by Take That and "All the Things She Said" by t.A.T.u. Madison also said that her friend curated a "stripper playlist" for her to get into character, including tracks from Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Slayyyter.
Worldwide distribution rights were acquired by FilmNation Entertainment in October 2023. The film was then sold by FilmNation to Le Pacte for France, Lev for Israel, Kismet for Australia and New Zealand, and Focus Features/Universal Pictures International for the rest of the world excluding North America in deals similar to those made on Baker's previous film, Red Rocket. In November 2023, Neon acquired North American distribution rights to the film, and opened it in limited release on October 18, 2024.
Anora premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2024, and won the festival's Palme d'Or on May 25. It earned a 10-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. It became the fifth consecutive Palme d'Or winner distributed by Neon in the United States, and the first American-produced film to win the Palme d'Or since Terrence Malick's 2011 epic The Tree of Life.
Anora also played at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the San Sebastián International Film Festival, the Busan International Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, the Rome Film Festival and several others. It was also the closing film at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2024. The film was released on digital platforms on December 17, 2024, with a streaming release on Hulu on March 17, 2025. It will be released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection on April 29.
According to Tom Quinn, CEO of Neon, the P&A and the awards season publicity campaign budget was $18 million.
As of April 3, 2025, Anora had grossed $20.5 million in the United States and Canada, and $36.1 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $56.6 million.
In the United States, the film made $550,503 in its opening weekend from six theaters; its per-screen-average of $91,751 was the best of 2024 (topping Kinds of Kindness' $75,458 average), and the second-best since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (after Asteroid City's $142,230). Expanding to 34 theaters in its second weekend, the film made $908,830 and finished in eighth place. Continuing its expansion, the film made $1.8 million from 253 theaters and $2.5 million from 1,104 in its third and fourth weekends. In its 21st week of release in March, following its five Oscar wins, the film was added to 1,130 theaters (for a total of 1,938) and made $1.8 million (an increase of 574% from the previous week), finishing in seventh.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of 336 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Another marvelous chronicle of America's strivers by writer-director Sean Baker given some extra pizzazz by Mikey Madison's brassy performance, Anora is a romantic drama on the bleeding edge." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 91 out of 100, based on 62 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". On AlloCiné, the film received an average rating of 4.2 out of 5, based on 45 reviews, from French critics.
Greta Gerwig, serving as the president of the 77th Cannes Film Festival Jury, commented that "[Anora] was something we collectively felt we were transported by, we were moved by [...] It felt both new and in conversation with older forms of cinema. There was something about it that reminded us of [the] classic structures of Lubitsch or Howard Hawks, and then it did something completely truthful and unexpected."
Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair wrote: "[Anora is] a wild, profane blast [...] Even when Baker's storytelling and dialogue gets repetitive, Madison keeps things lively [...] Still, a darkness thrums under the surface of all this flirting and bickering. Ani is forever yanked this way and that, degraded and disregarded [...] I found myself torn between finding Baker's conclusions compassionate and sensing a vague whiff of something patronizing." Justin Chang of The New Yorker wrote: "Anora plays like a wild dream—first joyous, then catastrophic, and always fiercely unpredictable [...] A contemporary return to screwball tradition is a welcome but challenging proposition, and Baker's play with the form is hardly seamless. [Anora] built up a righteous steam of fury, now unleashes it against the Ivans of the world and salutes those toiling thanklessly in their employ."
Sight and Sound named Anora the second-best film of 2024, and Film Comment named it one of the ten best. In 2025, Collider ranked the film at number 36 on its list of "The 40 Best Movies of the 2020s", with Jeremy Urquhart terming it "something of a modern classic". Anora was praised by many filmmakers and actors. However, one commentator, Russian-Jewish screenwriter Mikhail Idov [ru], found it difficult to reconcile support for the film, given the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine; he commented in the New York Times on February 27, 2025, "Its Oscar nominations, especially the best supporting actor one for Yura Borisov, have been touted by some as a national victory in Russia. Which puts me in the unsettling position of being in some truly terrible company in cheering for it."
Anora received praise from some sex workers for its depiction of the profession, which they described as a step forward from films of the past that tended to portray sex work as a social transgression worthy of condemnation. In a piece for Slate, Risdon Roberts contrasted the character of Ani with Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman, writing the former "is not a desperate or trafficked waif, nor is she a hooker with a heart of gold. Baker doesn't even set out to make [Ani] worthy of sympathy—instead, we're in awe of her prowess as she works the floor of a high-end strip club while the opening credits play ... Right away, it's clear that we're rooting for Ani not because she's down and out like Vivian—we're rooting for her because she's shrewd and in control".
Tiff Smith said, "We're seeing a fully developed character doing sex work without their profession defining them—that's what representation really is." Some said Baker's hiring of sex workers for the production as consultants and cast members was reflected in the film's attention to detail like the mundane realities of strip club life and labor issues.
Others felt that the film reverted to regressive stereotypes about sex workers as downtrodden and "in need of saving". A UK-based sex worker commented that the film "rehashes the 'traumatised, vulnerable sex worker' trope, which we've seen a thousand times before". Marla Cruz opined that little is revealed about Ani's life outside of sex work, and that an exploration of the "boundary between Ani the person and Ani the worker" is absent. Ayanna Dozier wrote "the film narratively builds upon and follows the social imaginaries of sex workers as subhuman projections for other people's fantasies". Cruz wrote that it is debatable "whether Ani becomes more clear-eyed about her relationship to power, men, and money throughout the film". Though Roberts appreciated the film generally, she critiqued the ending, writing that for real-life sex workers, the true goal is not to be saved by a man, but "is about survival (or, ideally, transcending the need to survive)". She added that rather than representing the knights in shining armor archetype, "Clients are a means to an end. Money can't break your heart."
The film has apparently had a mixed response in Russia, with some critics comparing it to a re-hashing of Pretty Woman. Anora has also been portrayed as a "national victory" and a sign of warming cultural relations between Russia and the West.
Anora won the Palme d'Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for five awards at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards, seven at the 78th British Academy Film Awards (winning Best Actress and Best Casting) and six at the 97th Academy Awards with Baker, Madison, and Borisov receiving nominations at each ceremony. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, becoming the fourth film (after The Lost Weekend, Marty, and Parasite) to win both it and the highest award at Cannes. Baker equalled the record set by Walt Disney for the most Academy Awards won by person in one year and is the only person to win all four for the same film.
The American Film Institute and the National Board of Review named Anora as one of the top 10 films of 2024. At the 30th Critics' Choice Awards, it became the first film to only win Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Picture and none of its other six nominations.