Anora

For about forty minutes this is a party. Neon, money, Vegas, a marriage that everybody in the audience can see is a disaster. Baker lets you enjoy it, which is what makes the rest work.

Then the film becomes a chase comedy involving three of the most incompetent henchmen ever committed to screen, and it is genuinely hilarious. Yura Borisov quietly steals the entire middle of the film by mostly being kind.

Mikey Madison is a force. Ani is loud, funny, permanently on the offensive, and the performance is built so that the moments she is not any of those things hit like a truck.

The farce does go on. There is a stretch of running around apartments that could lose ten minutes and lose nothing.

And then the ending. We are not going to spoil it. We are just going to say that it recontextualises everything before it in about ninety seconds, and that a very quiet cinema stayed very quiet for a while afterwards.