Anora (2024) Review

Anora (2024) Review 

Yesterday I was able to check out Anora. This is a movie that wasn’t really on my radar, I saw the trailer but it didn't really interest me. Then all of the early buzz and reviews were calling this movie fantastic, an early front runner for Best Picture, and one of the year’s best movies. But what did I think about the movie? Did it live up to the hype and everything that I’ve been hearing? Let’s get started!

The Review: This review is going to be structured very differently from how I normally structure reviews. I’m not structuring this one with the good and the bad and then giving my score. I sort of just wanted to talk about this movie because I have some interesting thoughts on it. So, I went into his movie hearing from a lot of people that this is one of 2024’s best movies. Probably going to be a popular film come awards season. I went into this movie with high expectations, curious to see what this movie was about. Leaving the movie…I was very confused by where the hype comes from. I think there’s some interesting ideas, the basic plot of the movie I thought provided for some interesting moments of drama and comedy. Some of the performances are fun, mainly the main actress. But the movie as a whole just didn’t work for me and I left the movie with quite a bit of problems that held it back for me. I also just didn’t get it, it’s not a movie that’s made for me. 

• If you don’t know what this movie is about, it’s about a sex worker who hooks up with this rich Russian kid they eventually fall in love with. The Russian wants to marry her (Anora) in order to have citizenship in America. But his parents find out about the marriage, they’re not happy about it so they send some goons to force them to get anolled. From there, the movie gets wild where the husband ditches on Anora. And Anora is left with these henchmen to find the husband. It gets weird and wild as you move into the back 60% of this movie. 

• I think the biggest problem with this movie is that it’s 25-30 minutes too long. The movie is 2 hours and 19 minutes long and in the back half of the movie I felt this run time. I was thinking multiple times here, they could cut so many scenes or reduce the scenes by 30 seconds to a minute and it’ll make the movie flow better and move better. I thought the first half of the movie, when it was focused on developing their relationship, was paced nicely. It kept the movie moving at a nice pace. Then once the search for the husband starts, the pacing for this movie changed drastically moving into the back half but not in a good way. It felt like they were stretching out scenes longer than they needed to be just so they could add a few more jokes into this movie. The director had all of these ideas for scenes that could happen or that he thought would be funny. But they don’t add anything to the plot of the story, you remove those bits and the movie is shorter and moves a bit better. The big example of this is when Anora and the henchman go to the candy shop. Basically the context of the scene is when Anora and the henchman are looking for the husband. And so they go to all of these different tops, where they meet some of his friends. The scene with the henchman in the candy shop it’s a fun payoff to a joke. But I don't feel like that joke needed much of a payoff. What makes these scenes frustrating is I felt like they wrote the characters dumb in order to make the movie longer and to have these joke bits in there. I don’t want to spoil too much about what I mean by that, but it felt like lazy storytelling. The script didn’t earn that joke or that moment, because the characters could have gone from A-B instead of from A-Z. That was really the big thing about this movie that bothered me, if this movie was 1 hour and 50 minutes long I probably would have enjoyed it. But when you’re 11 minutes short of 2 ½ hours, I felt like you were going on for too long. 

• The other part about the movie is that I didn’t find any of the characters likable. Therefore, I wasn’t really invested in the journey that Anora or the other characters were on. Also, I didn’t buy into the relationship between these two characters. Like I said, she’s a stripper, he’s a rich Russian. On the service, you can see how those two people could fall in love. But the movie is built around their relationship and when you don’t care about their relationship, you don’t care about the movie. It’s basically she gives him a lap dance, he’s charming so he invites her over to his house and they have sex. Eventually, he invites her to Las Vegas to get married. They say in the movie that they only knew each other for two weeks prior to getting married. This kind of relationship with how it started, I can’t buy into it as two people being in love. Perhaps if the movie focused more on that and not all of the wild and weird antics, I could buy into it more. But it was so focused on getting to the fun antics in the back half that they didn’t develop the romance to be interesting. The movie attempts to pull at the heart strings in the back half of the movie and I didn’t feel anything. Since the rise and fall of their relationship happened so quickly, I didn’t feel the emotional scenes at the end. I thought the characters were stupid to begin with and they should have thought this out more. 

• Also, part of the problem with this movie is that it was so overhyped to me. Maybe that’s not a fair critique of the movie, because it’s not the movie’s fault. But when I heard for weeks straight that this was a top 10 movie of the year, an early contender for Best Picture. I believe it won several awards at the Cannes film festival earlier this year. I went into this movie with certain expectations, I thought I was really going to like it, maybe even love it. I left the movie confused and not thinking it worked. One of the big things that I heard going into this movie is that it’s one of the funniest movies of the year. Cody Leach, a YouTuber that I follow from time to time, said that it’s up there with Deadpool & Wolverine as the funniest film of the year. I chuckled a couple of times, but I wouldn’t label this movie as a comedy. Granted, my audience consisted of me and two other people. So perhaps with a bigger crowd of people the movie could have been funnier. But I chuckled at a few of the jokes, but even some of the jokes I didn’t realize were jokes. That’s another thing that really hurt this movie for me. Maybe part of that is unfair to criticize this movie, but I have to list reasons why this movie didn’t work for me and this is certainly one of them. 

• I know that I’m being negative about this movie, there are some good qualities about it. The lead actress is Mikey Madison, I primarily knew her from Scream (2022). She’s pretty solid in this movie, would I give her a Best Actress nomination probably not. She’s very good, she needs to portray this very complex character that’s feeling a lot of different emotions. She can be funny and charming in scenes, when she needs to get frustrated she can pull that off well. The basic idea of telling the story of Cinderella with sex workers and this wild chase through New York City is rather interesting. There’s some interesting ideas that come with that and you can see what the movie is going for and what it’s trying to communicate. But the way it’s communicated through the story, felt way too complex. The journey could have gone from A-B but instead it goes from A-Z.  

Final Thoughts: I know I'm the polar opposite of what other people are saying about this movie. If I’m being 100% honest, I did not understand this movie and do not get the hype. If this movie gets a Best Picture nomination (which I’m sure it will, I’ll be confused). I don’t get where the praise is coming from, it’ll be either at the bottom or towards the bottom of my Best Picture ranking. There’s some good elements, Mikey Madison is good. But the movie as a whole really didn’t work for me and I was confused by it. 

The Score: 7.7/10 (C)