Anora (2024) - TIFF Review By Ben Scanga
Sean Baker is a human that loves other humans. He’s been proving this non-stop for two decades now since he first started making heads turn with Take Out (which he co-directed alongside Shih-Ching Tsou), an emotionally charged and sobering day-in-the-life of an immigrant struggling to pay off his smuggling debt while facing the tension around his presence in America’s society. As his filmography grew larger, especially around the time The Florida Project began attracting eyeballs from festival-goers worldwide, so did Baker’s ambition and sense of scale. Anora , his eighth feature length film, effectively acts as a sprawling, kaleidoscope-drenched puzzle, composed of little pieces from all of his previous efforts. When taking a step back and acknowledging the bigger picture of what’s being portrayed on screen (including, and most importantly, how it’s being portrayed), it’s hard to view this as anything other than his greatest accomplishment to date; it’s a feature that highlights all o