Sometimes it feels like an actor has just been waiting for their breakout moment: Mikey Madison just had hers at the Cannes Film Festival. She has been good for a long time in projects like Better Things, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Scream. (In both of the latter titles she, bizarrely, played a crazed villain who was ultimately lit on fire. She has a great scream.)
But she has never quite had a role like the title character in Sean Baker’s Anora, a twisted fairy tale about a sex worker who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch. The film is very funny, until it punches you in the gut with a beautiful ending, and it entirely rests on Madison’s performance as the tough-as-nails Anora.
Anora, however, goes by Ani, when we first meet her through a series of lap dances at the midtown strip club where she works. That night her boss tells her to go meet with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a........