Anora

It's a crowd-pleaser, funny and sexy and raucous, while also being startlingly wise and tender.

It's that conundrum I dread most as a critic: reviewing the movie that everyone's raving about, but that I think is merely OK.

"Anora" takes audiences on one wild ride with Baker maintaining a firm but relaxed grip on the wheel.

Mikey Madison's amazing in this. I mean this character has such toughness, grit, strength, character, she's surprising, she's ferocious.

This is an undeniable star-making performance for Madison, who finds the grace and charm and stupidity and selfishness and wild-eyed wonder of Mikey, a tough survivor who falls for the oldest fairy tale in the book.

It's our "Pretty Woman," for our time, with unexpected ripples of real feeling - and thanks to Madison, real stardom in the making.

It's lush, it's electrifying, it's wild. But more than that, the movie has real heart.

Baker's selection of incidents, his ability to render them vividly in a short time, and his discipline in not going longer are all worthy of praise.

An edgy rom-com with sparkling performances and unpredictable energy.

Madison uses her liquid eyes and wary, rubbery smile not to win us over a la Julia Roberts but to show how Ani sheds her illusions and comes to understand both her own power and the larger powerlessness of a working woman in a world run by men and boys...

It also marks the arrival of Mikey Madison who, after smaller roles in films like "Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood" and the "Scream" reboot, sets the screen alight in a breakout performance for the ages that already feels profoundly timeless.

Perhaps the director's most conventional effort to date; it even veers toward cliché in its final scene. But what comes before is strong enough to make it hit anyway.

There's a significant work of art lurking within "Anora," but it's confined within the limits of a potboiler.

In an awards season of overlong seriousness, Madison's Anora pops like Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment.

Yet again, Sean Baker nails it. Anora somehow straddles a fine line as the year's funniest and most heart-wrenching movie.

"Anora" isn't a fairy tale that plays by the rules of Prince Charmings and happy endings. Instead, it thankfully explores something more real: people just trying to get through the day with some sense of hope and human connection.

A fairy tale - or at least a version of one - shatters into a million tiny pieces in "Anora"...

At its core it's a romantic dramedy that's gotten a lot of comparisons to Pretty Woman, though it seems even more spiritually akin to Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria.

It's absolutely breathless in terms of its energy.

As brazen and unapologetic as many of Baker's characters are… There is a desperation and a dependency on others that Ani refuses to let define her.