Anora (2024)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Every awards season, there's at least one golden darling lauded by the masses that I can't stand. This year, it's Anora. 

The title character, called Ani by most folks in the film, is a lively and willful Russian-American living in Brooklyn. She's an exotic dancer and sex worker, seen masterfully plying her craft in the film's frank and hypnotic opening shot. Unlike her counterpart in Pretty Woman, to which this film has been tirelessly compared, Ani is remarkably down-to-earth and content with her line of work. She connects with various clients, bickers and gossips with her coworkers, and has no ambition or pretension of rising above or beyond her station. She doesn't even seem interested in romance, and has no delusions about being swept away by a man. But, of course, some of her clients have a lot of money and aren't as self-aware as she is, so inevitably, one of them decides she's his girl.

The typical Cinderella story launches when Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the wealthy playboy son of a Russian oligarch, frequents her club and asks for someone who can understand Russian. She can understand the language, but doesn't speak it, so there's a curious disconnect between them when she continues to speak English. She won't let even this charming twink of a man play her like a pawn; she will keep her strategy close. Ani becomes his living fantasy ("God bless America," he says once while orgasming) while Ivan becomes her sole benefactor, arranging to be her only client and for her to accompany him to parties and getaways in his family mansion on the seaside. Their transactional relationship isn't cute or romantic; he's always distracted, playing video games in various states of undress while she sits and watches, clinging on to him until he's ready to fornicate again. By the time he proposes to her on a whim in Vegas, she seems to have dollar signs in her eyes rather than hearts, but it's clear her affection (or feigned affection, to be debated) for him is in some way greater than his for her.

Their whirlwind marriage and shopping spree comes to a screeching halt when Ivan's parents hear of their son's marriage to an escort. They empower a local priest on their payroll, Toros, who keeps an eye on their US property (and son) to annul and dissolve the marriage and reign in their spoiled and prodigal son. He, in turn, hires two gangster buffoons to get Anora out of the house. They show up like something out of a mediocre crime flick, and while Ivan cowers in fear and shame, Ani gets shockingly manhandled. The sequence is meant, apparently, to be funny. It is not.

And this is where my problems with the film kick into high gear. It's one thing to have an obnoxious and rote opening for a pseudo-rom-com like this, but just when it could start to get interesting, Baker decides to marry his contrived, generic premise with that "slice of life" aesthetic that frankly I almost never enjoy in a film. Hints of it start earlier in the film, but it's the home invasion scene when I nearly stopped the film altogether. As the mercenaries push in the door and corner the newlyweds, all four characters talk and don't stop, yelling over each other as they demand various things, making ugly accusations and refusing to listen or pause for each other. Of course this might be "realistic," especially for spoiled, privileged jerks, but it's unbearable to hear, especially in this age of poorly recorded dialogue. Lengthy minutes pass with completely unintelligible verbal eruptions from the characters as they physically assault each other, destroying this expensive living room that was never comfortable and belongs to none of them. Then there's the obnoxiously stereotypical element of their Russian and/or Brooklyn accents, which become so grating I had to mute my television multiple times.

Admittedly, it's just not my kind of film at this point. If you know me, you know I almost never care about a film solely interested in a young adult heterosexual "romance," if that's even what this rightly can be called. Worse, I rarely care about gangster crime films unless there are significant other elements at work (think John Wick), and ones based in specific ethnic or linguistic regions especially turn me off; it's why I never choose to watch even Scorsese's gangster flicks. The caricatured Italian, Russian, Bostonian, or, worst, Brooklynite gangster in a film of glorified material and capital excess and criminal violence just makes me feel sick. And once Anora starts with it, it doesn't stop.

Mikey Madison (Scream 5, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood) plays Ani with vim and verve, so to speak, with a backbone and fangs ready to fight back whenever a man tries to put her in her place. The character has had to, presumably, in her line of work, for survival. But when squaring off against the thugs, she becomes a petulant child, biting and thrashing while partly naked, insulting them in sexual terms while constantly screaming and cussing to distraction. By the time one thug, Igor, ties her up with a phone cord, I actually really wanted him to gag her just so the soundscape would cool down (I had the speakers muted for this part anyway). And while her screeching, monotonous babbling was clearly a choice Madison made -- or was elicited by her director -- that doesn't make it pleasant to witness in this scene or for the rest of the wretched film.

Igor (Yura Borisov) seems to be a more emotionally aware character than anyone else in the film, and Baker latches on to that, ensuring that we understand his absorbing of information. In particular, the brief moments when Ani is truly vulnerable are clocked and stored by Igor and, by extension, us. It becomes shockingly obvious that he will grow to understand her on a greater personal level than any other character in the film -- including Ani herself -- and that the two will embark on their own something by film's end. I guess that could be a spoiler, but a) I don't care, because I hope nobody else sees this miserable movie, and b) it's painfully obvious from the home invasion scene where this plot is heading. Both Igor and Ani are characters in lower classes, people doing hard jobs to make a living while being thrown money at by people who don't work, don't get their hands dirty, and who treat them like problems to be foisted off by a well-written check. Of course they're going to bond.

Baker, ever the humanist, is the kind of director I can usually respect even if I don't like what he creates. The Florida Project is his only film I've liked, and even that came close to the brink for me in its poverty porn and dreamlike sentimentality. His pretentious approach to this film was manifest in the studio's shameless awards campaign, and was only made worse when I finally saw what everyone was buzzing about. Cinematographer Drew Daniels captures NYC with a beautiful lens on film stock, making things feel from the '70s or '80s more than 2025, but that's about where my appreciation of the film ends. Like Uncut Gems, this is the kind of profoundly ugly film I just can't stand. Art is subjective, and projects like this are distinctly out of my personal charmed circle. I didn't laugh, didn't cry, and hated about four-fifths of the excessive runtime. In fact, the only scenes I can safely say I enjoyed -- and saw Madison's raw talent for the first time ever -- are smack at the film's end, in two quiet moments Ani shares with Igor as they figure themselves out.

Scream (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

What's your favorite scary movie?

We're finally going back to Woodsboro, for the first time since Wes Craven left us. I was an outspoken fan of the MTV series that he helped launch, though it ended with a bit of a whimper, and frankly I worried that would be the end of the franchise. But we live in an age when the horrors of our youth are returning with a vengeance, and our culturally jaded sensibilities about these things live on Reddit threads and Twitter in ways Kevin Williamson knowingly predicted back in 1996, when it was all cafeteria conversations and underground movie screenings. And with the fairly recent phenomenon of the "requel" -- a reboot and sequel that tends to go back to the famed original -- it makes perfect sense for us to Scream again.

This time, however, it's mostly new folks behind the scenes. Williamson is back as producer, while the screenplay is from James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, and the film is helmed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (from Ready or Not, Southbound, and V/H/S). These new names, however, are uniformly determined to honor Craven's legacy, and much of this movie looks and feels like the franchise we know and love. There is a reason this series resonates so strongly with its cult fanbase, and this movie was clearly made by members of that group. Meticulously plotted, written within an inch of its own life, Scream 5, or as I prefer, 5cream (I'm sorry, but I just can't call it Scream), is a thrilling whodunnit, a razor-sharp satire on self-awareness in the age of information, and the most shockingly violent entry in the series.

It opens, as we expect, with a phone call, during which time an isolated young woman plays horror movie trivia with a murderous stalker. But the movie throws us a delicious bone to chew on as Tara (Jenna Ortega of You, Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous) reveals that she prefers "elevated horror" to slashers, and her favorite movie is The Babadook. A few other tasty references in the film include The Witch, Hereditary, and Jordan Peele, but those modern masterpieces aren't as palatable for psychopaths, who want to reinvent the proverbial wheel. The kids in this installment aren't oddballs like Randy Meeks (from the first two) who stock VHS tapes at Blockbuster all day; these are kids so disaffected by horror that they choose to stream a Stab marathon while in the hospital room of a girl who was literally just stabbed. Their knowledge surpasses that of the expert, but their wisdom leaves more than a little to be desired.

As bodies begin to pile up around town, the kids band together to hunt the killer. Of course, they do so while sitting around a sectional sofa and accuse each other. More than once during this movie, I wondered how on earth these kids were friends with each other, as they so readily and earnestly think each other butchers classmates. It's not tongue-in-cheek as it was in Craven's films. These kids live in a world where teens their age walk down streets with assault rifles on national television and get away with it. And the filmmakers know it, as they inject a fierce, terrifying brutality into the film's limited but intense kills; when one returning character is gutted in broad daylight in the front lawn, and that character's charming offspring gets his carotid slit in seductive and repulsive real time, my stomach was in tight knots.

Ghostface's return prompts Tara's sister Sam (Melissa Barrera of In the Heights) to return to town, her boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid of The Boys) in tow. Much like the original heroine of the series, Sam has some really dark family history, and it's revealed surprisingly early to us in a series of haunting visions she alone can see. Without spoiling it, we get a delightful legacy cameo, and the inclusion of this plot devices works hard to validate some of the weirder elements of the usually more-disparaged Scream 3. Fewer than 20 minutes into this movie, it's already established an incredible amount of information and detail, to say nothing of its expansive cast, which includes Randy's twin nephew/niece pairing Chad and Mindy (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown), Tara's protective friend Amber (Mikey Madison), group friend Liv (Sonia Ben Ammar) whose boyfriend was recently butchered, and legacy character Judy Hicks (Marley Shelton), now sheriff, and her son Wes (Dylan Minnette).

It's a huge cast, and then the real legacy characters come in. Sam and Richie enlist the help of Dewey (David Arquette), the retired and perhaps slightly disgraced former sheriff, who is consoling himself with the bottle following Gale's divorce. The news leads him to call Gale (Courteney Cox) and Sidney (Neve Campbell), and before you know it, they're back in town. They're not the focus of this film, but they are treated with profound respect and authority, not unlike the legacy characters in the Star Wars or Jurassic World requels. Each of the three made me cry in this movie, and the love with which their characters are treated is nothing short of satisfying. But, as we know (or will learn from the Meeks kids), requel rules are different; legacy characters will likely end up on the cutting room floor this time around.

Whereas Craven learned his craft from John Carpenter and even Alfred Hitchcock, the new directors here model their craft from Craven, and so this movie feels authentically part of the franchise. It's by no means my favorite entry, or even favorite sequel, but it is a solid, thoroughly entertaining movie that sparkles and chills in all the right ways. It's frustrating at times, but in the way that most slashers are, and that's part of the calculated risk of this genre. While it's hard not to wish for Craven's impossibly tight control of editing and content -- never a slack moment in any Craven film -- and frankly the performances of the young cast leave a bit to be desired, it's really not fair to compare this work with the Craven entries. Let's just be thankful we can still visit Woodsboro for a creepy good time again, and frankly, I think we'll be returning again soon.