Few films in recent memory capture the volatility of love, money, and identity with the unflinching tenderness of Anora, Sean Baker’s incandescent latest. Already hailed as the best film of 2024; and rightly so, it now arrives in a Criterion Collection 4K UHD edition that is, by all measures, exemplary. If there is a gold standard for physical media in 2025, Anora may have already set it.
THE FILM
From the jaundiced fringes of Florida motels to the sun-blasted pink purgatory of Texas strip donut shops, Sean Baker has built his cinematic universe on the margins. In Anora, his latest and perhaps most audacious film, he trades the pastel poverty of The Florida Project and the gonzo verité of Tangerine for something more opulent, yet no less precarious: the story of a Russian oligarch’s wayward son and the sex worker he impulsively marries.
Baker has always been a cartographer of unlikely love stories, and in Anora, he drafts his map with a reckless, neon-lit pen. Structured in three distinct acts, each tonally and stylistically divergent but seamlessly stitched together—the film is a phantasmagoric odyssey through money, desire, and delusion.
We begin in the glittering half-world of high-end stripping, where we meet Anora (played with thunderous charisma by Mikey Madison), a dancer fluent in Russian and fluent, too, in the transactional grammar of intimacy. She captures the attention of Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a gauche 21-year-old heir to untold billions and perhaps the most emotionally bankrupt trust fund romantic since The Great Gatsby. Their courtship unfolds in a flurry of caviar-dusted nights, smoke-hazed bedrooms, and absurdly expensive whimsy, climaxing in a shotgun Vegas wedding that feels less like a union and more like a dare.
Then the film changes. Act Two barrels forward with the speed and nervous energy of a defibrillator shock. When Vanya’s handlers catch wind of the nuptials and alert his exiled royal-family-as-boardroom-oligarch parents, the dream curdles into a chase. Anora and the family’s hired muscle tear through a wintry New Jersey in search of the runaway groom. Think Uncut Gems, but with fur coats, Eastern European swearing, and a surprisingly effective use of EDM as tension-building device.
The third act descends, there is no better word for it, into tragedy. The parents arrive, sweeping in with the cold, clinical wrath of people who have never been told “no.” What was once a romance dissolves in the acid bath of wealth, power, and the enduring global tradition of familial control masquerading as love. Vanya reveals himself as feckless and spineless, and Anora, betrayed and brutalized, is left to reckon with the ruin of her fairy tale.
But this is not a morality tale. Baker never moralizes. Anora is about yearning; the sort that money can amplify but never satisfy. It’s also about performance: the one Madison delivers with astonishing range and dexterity, and the one Anora herself performs daily, toggling between persona and person, vulnerability and command. It is, quite simply, one of the most magnetic performances in recent American cinema: raw, flamboyant, devastating.
Baker’s camera is as restless as ever, pirouetting through strip clubs, gliding across casino floors, skimming across icy Jersey streets with a near-lyrical sense of momentum. The film’s visual style, both frenetic and impressionistic, finds beauty in unlikely corners: a gas station at midnight, the glow of a rideshare car’s interior, a torn cocktail dress catching the morning light. And then there is the humor, pitch-black and expertly deployed. Baker mines the absurdity of wealth with surgical precision, never letting the audience forget that these lives, for all their extravagance, are just as brittle as the dollar that fuels them.
Anora is not just a film. It is a dare, a hallucination, a scream in three parts. It may very well be the first great American film of 2024; wildly entertaining, emotionally pulverizing, and, yes, holy shit-level good. In a landscape of prestige cinema that too often mistakes solemnity for depth, Anora dares to be kinetic, funny, vulgar, romantic, and tragic all at once. It doesn’t just ask for your attention, it grabs you by the collar and demands it. Baker has made his masterpiece. And Mikey Madison? She’s incandescent.
PURCHASE ANORA ON 4K HERE
THE VIDEO
Sean Baker’s Anora, a riotous and heartrending triptych of romance, recklessness, and ruin, arrives in the Criterion Collection with a transfer as vivid and volatile as the film itself. Presented in a 2160p UHD 4K format with HDR10, this edition does more than preserve Baker’s vision, it refracts it into something almost mythic. The disc’s visual presentation is nothing short of revelatory. The HDR10 enhancement deepens the velvet shadows of New Jersey’s strip clubs, allowing the fluorescent flicker of neon to buzz with a seductive menace. In these sequences, the black levels don’t simply ground the frame, they sharpen the contrast between the film’s dreamlike highs and its bleary-eyed comedowns.
The palette is characteristically Baker: both naturalistic and brazen. New Jersey, rendered here in muggy browns and overcast ambers, feels palpably lived-in. But when the action shifts westward, Las Vegas unfurls in a visual fugue of saturated pinks, electric blues, and golds that shimmer on the edge of kitsch. The Criterion transfer does justice to the film’s visual dialogue, where grime and glamor are not opposites but dance partners.
Detail, too, is a triumph. The camera lingers on faces, fabrics, and fleeting gestures with an unhurried intimacy, and the 4K scan captures it all: the glint of sweat beneath stage lights, the lacquered emptiness of a McMansion foyer, the tender chaos of a champagne room in the thick of desperation. Establishing shots, always a Baker strength, arrive with cinematic grace, the film’s natural grain preserved to evoke something textural and tactile, as if Anora were less a movie than a memory burned into celluloid. Criterion, ever the steward of artful chaos, has curated this release with appropriate reverence. The film’s visual language, its high-octane romanticism, its moments of sudden stillness, is allowed to sing, to stutter, and to burn. In Anora, the surfaces matter, and in this edition, they shimmer.
THE AUDIO
With Anora, now gracing the Criterion Collection in a full-bodied DTS-HD 5.1 audio presentation, Sean Baker’s urban fairytale is not only seen but deeply heard, its soundscape as immersive and deliberate as its glitter-drenched visuals. Though dialogue-driven, and often toggling with ease between English, Russian, and Armenian, Anora pulses with the ambient chaos of lived life. This is a surround mix that works like a peripheral nervous system, alert, responsive, and deeply textured. The rear channels are alive with the sonic flotsam of Baker’s world: car horns snarl in Jersey traffic, engines hum with anxious intent, slot machines ping in the distance like a chorus of broken promises, and the smolder of cigarettes crackles almost imperceptibly beneath conversations.
The low-end frequencies are used with restraint but precision. In the strip clubs and party scenes, the bass doesn’t just underscore the beat, it occupies space, rumbling through the subfloor like the distant echo of an incoming reckoning. And yet the film knows when to exhale: in quieter moments, the mix allows for natural reverb, a kind of architectural breathing in wide hotel lobbies and half-empty living rooms. Intimacy is rendered not just visually but aurally; through the gentle shuffle of bodies, the soft clink of glass, the almost sacred hush between words. Dialogue, despite the polyglot nature of the script, is rendered with clarity and intention. Each voice is distinct, weighted with emotional texture, and never drowned by the sonic bustle. English subtitles appear when needed, unobtrusively and with care, ensuring the linguistic fluidity of the narrative remains an asset, not a barrier.
Perhaps most impressively, the score; and Baker’s always-savvy musical selections, fuse seamlessly with the diegetic world. Whether pulsing beneath a romantic high or surfacing like a bruise during a moment of heartbreak, the music amplifies mood without dictating it. In all, this is an audio mix that does what the best sound design does: it expands the world without ever overwhelming it. Anora sounds, quite literally, like the wild, tragic, and deeply human story it tells.
THE EXTRAS
- Audio Commentary #1 – Sean Baker, Alex Coco, Samantha Quan, Drew Daniels (The Crew)
- Audio Commentary #2 – Sean Baker, Mikey Madison, Ura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Kragulian, and Vache Tovmasyan (The Cast)
- Sean Baker Interview (10 Mins.)
- Sean Baker and Mikey Madison Interview (13 Mins.)
- Stripped Down (68 Mins.)
- Cannes Press Conference (42 Mins.)
- Mikey Madison and Lindsey Norminton (36 Mins.)
- Deleted Scenes (8 Mins.)
- Audition Footage (15 Mins.)
- Trailers (7 Mins.)
- Criterion Booklet
THE ULTIMATE WORD
In a cultural moment where streaming’s convenience often comes at the expense of permanence, Anora on Criterion stands as a defiant artifact; vivid, essential, and built to last. It is more than just a standout release; it’s a preservation of a film that already feels iconic. Highest recommendation, without hesitation.
WRITTEN BY: BRYAN KLUGER
BRYAN KLUGER, A SEASONED VOICE IN THE REALM OF ENTERTAINMENT CRITICISM, HAS CONTRIBUTED TO A WIDE ARRAY OF PUBLICATIONS INCLUDING ARTS+CULTURE MAGAZINE, HIGH DEF DIGEST, BOOMSTICK COMICS, AND HOUSING WIRE MAGAZINE, AMONG OTHERS.
HIS INSIGHTS ARE ALSO CAPTURED THROUGH HIS PODCASTS; MY BLOODY PODCAST AND FEAR AND LOATHING IN CINEMA PODCAST; WHICH LISTENERS CAN ENJOY ACROSS A VARIETY OF PLATFORMS.
IN ADDITION TO HIS WRITTEN WORK, KLUGER BRINGS HIS EXPERTISE TO THE AIRWAVES, HOSTING TWO LIVE RADIO SHOWS EACH WEEK: SOUNDTRAXXX RADIO ON WEDNESDAYS AND THE ENTERTAINMENT ANSWER ON SUNDAYS. HIS MULTIFACETED APPROACH TO MEDIA AND CULTURE OFFERS A UNIQUE, IMMERSIVE PERSPECTIVE FOR THOSE WHO SEEK BOTH DEPTH AND ENTERTAINMENT.
