How Bafta 2025-winning Anora brought back what’s been missing from modern cinema

One of the most anticipated films of the year is finally here.

How Bafta 2025-winning Anora brought back what’s been missing from modern cinema
Anora is one of the hottest contenders for the 2025 Oscars (Picture: Neon via AP)

It’s a huge task for any filmmaker to try to bring back something from the past on screen: at a time when cinema is changing rapidly, it feels almost impossible.

But Sean Baker had an intention with his latest effort Anora, one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2024 and the winner of the 2025 Baftas, as well as the 2024 Palme D’Or – to reintroduce something to modern-day cinema that has been missing.

Of his inspiration for the effervescent Anora, he told Metro that it’s ‘films from the 80s that were dramas or dramadies made for adults that we’re not seeing a lot of these days.’

‘And I think that was part of the goal with this movie, to bring something like that back to the cinema,’ he shared while continuing the film’s intense press tour at the London Film Festival last year, alongside leading lady Mikey Madison.

Anora focuses on a free-spirited Brooklyn-based stripper and sex worker (Madison) who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch to create a fairytale escape from her life. And, as you’d expect, it’s already creating major Oscar buzz.

Baker’s version of ‘dramedy’ actually encompasses drama, thriller, slapstick comedy, a coming of age story, a rom-com and a bit of a road movie. Add all that together with his interest in focusing on people living on the margins of society, who feel uncannily real, and no one is really making films like Baker in 2024.

They’re vibrant, unpredictable and about as far away as you can get away from studio tentpole movies based on superheroes, with their accompanying mega budgets.