Between Anora winning the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, scoring the highest per-screen-average opening of 2024 and topping Oscar predictions lists, few filmmakers are having a better year than Sean Baker. However, this success did not come overnight for the 53-year-old; it follows two decades of scraping by on shoestring budgets and doing the rounds on the indie film circuit. Now, his riotous, high-octane tragicomedy about a Russian-American sex worker who spontaneously marries the son of an oligarch has finally earned Baker his moment in the spotlight. 

Such subject matter is no new territory for Baker. From exploring the plight of undocumented migrants in Take Out and Prince of Broadway to foregrounding the precarious realities of sex work in Tangerine and The Florida Project, the New Jersey native has always possessed a knack for capturing life on the fringes of society. Unafraid to probe the limits of our empathy, his films reflect a defiant commitment to grappling with morally complex characters and uncomfortable truths – those we too often avert our gaze from when we happen upon them in our own lives.    

Renowned for street-casting actors in unlikely places (Craigslist, theatre lobbies and local YMCAs, to name a few) and experimenting with improvisational dialogue, each frame embodies a startlingly lived-in quality that allows us to feel less like tourists and more like inhabitants of Baker’s world. It’s precisely this singularity of vision and refusal to sacrifice authenticity at the altar of cinematic convention that situates him as one of the most captivating filmmakers of our time.

Ahead of Anora’s UK release, AnOther recommends six formative works from America’s indie darling.

Take Out (2004)

Although not Baker’s directorial debut, Take Out represents his first formal attempt at the distinctive fly-on-the-wall approach we know him for today. Co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou (who went on to produce, costume design and act in several of Baker’s subsequent works), the film follows illegal Chinese immigrant Ming Ding who falls behind on payments on his smuggling debt and is given until the end of the day to come up with the money. 

Shot for less than $3,000 on a Sony PD150 DV camera, what ensues is an 87-minute, sweat-inducing race against the clock that reveals the tenacity and fragility of the American dream. With rough, handheld tracking shots of Ming weaving his bicycle through traffic, close-ups of cash registers opening and closing and the inclusion of real workers and customers in the background, Take Out asserts itself as one of the most profound on-screen portrayals of New York City.  

Nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2008 Film Independent Spirit Awards, the triumph of Baker’s sophomore effort lies in its harrowing revelation that while we often deserve more than we get, the world doesn’t owe us anything. 

Read our feature on the film here. 

Prince of Broadway (2008)

Prince of Broadway is where Baker hits his stride, seamlessly blending narrative and documentary styles to tell the story of a street hustler burdened with the unexpected responsibility of fatherhood. Partially based on the lead actor Prince Adu’s experiences, the film wastes no time thrusting us into the predicament at hand, as we duck in and out of back rooms filled with counterfeit goods and manoeuvre between brawls and arrests.  

At one point, the protagonist staggers through the streets with his son in his arm, crying out, “Why will no one look at me?” – a heartrending embodiment of the filmmaker’s insistence not just on the humanity but also the real hopes and dreams of those so routinely marginalised. In true Baker fashion, Prince of Broadway avoids either sugarcoating or sensationalising its subjects, showing them only as they are and inviting us to challenge our own assumptions about the hidden hardships that underpin the city that never sleeps. 

Starlet (2012)

Radiant yet subdued, Starlet charts the unexpected friendship between 21-year-old porn star Jane and 85-year-old Sadie, whose paths cross when the former uncovers a stash of money in a Thermos purchased at the latter’s yard sale. The women find a sense of purpose in each other as they navigate their respective struggles with ageing and loneliness.   

Eschewing plot for people, the film relishes in its quiet confidence that we will surrender ourselves to its lackadaisical pace, accompanying the characters through the minutiae of their day-to-day tasks. That the bingo halls, public parks and barely furnished apartments of Californian suburbia feel sentimental by the end of the film is a credit to Baker’s willingness to seek out beauty in the most unassuming of places. 

In his words, “I want to feel like I’m living and breathing with the characters and spending time with them.” After all, the titular role belongs to none other than the director’s own bedazzled harness-sporting chihuahua, Boonee. 

Tangerine (2015)

On Christmas Eve 2013, Baker had an iPhone 5s, Donut Time and a dream. The result? Tangerine – a rip-roaring farce about a transgender sex worker tracking down her cheating pimp through the hyper-saturated streets of Los Angeles. Brought to life by the infectious double act of first-time actors Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, the film brims over with both laugh-out-loud comedy (“You didn’t have to Chris Brown the bitch!”) and striking vulnerability (“The world can be a cruel place.”)

Lensed entirely through the Apple device, Baker’s fifth feature rides on a kinetic, guerrilla-style energy that offers a candid glimpse into a community that demands to be seen and heard on its own terms. Culminating in a 20-minute confrontation at a fluorescent-lit doughnut joint that exposes a slew of lies and betrayals, it emphasises the tenderness of friendship amidst what can otherwise be a hard-knock existence. Going on to win the Audience Award at the 2015 Gotham Awards, this is the film that put the Tisch alumnus on the map as a serious voice in independent cinema. 

The Florida Project (2017)

The most critically acclaimed of Baker’s catalogue so far, The Florida Project is a bittersweet snapshot of a mother and daughter navigating the looming threat of homelessness. Subverting the name of Walt Disney’s utopian vision, this “Florida project” sheds light on the world of dilapidated motels that serve as makeshift homes for low-income families across America. 

Yet, the fantasy remains alive for the rambunctious trio at the core of the film: six-year-old Moonee (played with preternatural sensitivity by Brooklynn Prince), her best friend Scooty and new girl Jancey. Together, they spend their summer break scamming tourists for free ice cream, hurling spit at car windshields and setting abandoned houses on fire. Drenched in hazy 35mm, Baker envelops us in their childlike sense of wonder, as we meander aimlessly from neon buildings to grassy plains to candy-floss sunsets. 

Treading the line between joy and despair is no mean feat, but Baker’s deeply humanist gaze steers clear of any condescension that typically befalls films of a similar genre. Ultimately, it is Moonee’s innocent words that linger long after the credits roll: “You know why this is my favourite tree? Because it tipped over, and it’s still growing.”

Read our feature on the film here. 

Red Rocket (2021)

Red Rocket has everything going for it – numerous needle drops of NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye, the most inspired line delivery of “homeless suitcase pimp” committed to screen and well, Simon Rex. Set against the backdrop of small-town Texas, the film acts as a character study of washed-up male porn star Mikey Saber, who sets his beady eyes on a local teenage girl as the protégé that will restore him to fame and glory. 

Baker operates at full throttle here, splicing gritty realism and dark humour together to transform a portrait of dysfunction into something oddly moving. Rex (rumoured to have dabbled in porn in the 90s himself) puts in a mesmeric, one-of-a-kind performance as Mikey, shifting imperceptibly from charm to narcissism to bitterness all in one frame. 

Lacking any neat resolutions to its intricate themes of male ego, sexual exploitation and self-delusion, Red Rocket encourages us instead to reckon with the inherently human instinct to reinvent and survive – no matter the cost. What we are left with is a film that is as audacious and ambitious as its star, cementing Baker as America’s foremost chronicler of life on the brink. 

Anora is out in UK cinemas on 1 November 2024.

Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy – Reprise, Oslo, August 31st, and The Worst Person in the World – wryly and sensitively chart the evolving pressures of modernity for young Norwegians across the first couple of decades of the 21st century. Ambition and expression, ego and self-knowledge are in conflict with each other, and with an immediate, disarming style and startlingly intimate performances (including beautiful Scandi actors shedding perfect tears in gorgeous naturalistic light), the trilogy observes how spiritual crises have been replicated for a generation of modern youngsters. His latest and most ambitious drama, Sentimental Value, is clearly connected to his trilogy of best received work, primarily because it’s about the deeper generational pain that can’t be unearthed and cleansed by personal discovery.

Nora (Renate Reinsve) is an actress on the rise, but suffers a catastrophic anxiety attack seconds before stepping on stage at Oslo’s National Theatre. Her father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), is a celebrated Swedish film director who has remained distant from Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) since their parents divorced years prior. When their mother passes away, Gustav returns to Nora’s life and the looming, historic family home that Nora has a lifetime of shifting, unprocessed feelings about. Trier once again deploys a disembodied narrator to take us through his character’s inner worlds, and an opening montage deftly introduces us to Nora’s inner contradictions: as a child, she wrote an essay from the perspective of the house, but when she rediscovered the piece when prepping for an audition, she dismissed her unsophisticated but honest insight into a fraught upbringing when she rediscovers the essay while prepping for an audition years later. 

Gustav is an arrogant, vain artist who can only manifest close relationships through his work – it’s no surprise the reason he wants to reenter his hesitant daughter’s life is to cast her in a new project set in their family home about a young mother who commits suicide (this is also how Gustav’s mother passed). Nora is appalled and rejects the offer, leading to Gustav inviting the buzzy American starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), whose intrusion on Nora’s family home triggers more panic. Sentimental Value is pitched as an exploration of “the reconciliatory power of art”, but for most of the film, it’s an incisive look at art’s inability to create truly purifying expression. 

When Nora flees the house seconds before Rachel first intrudes on it, Trier cuts to her rehearsing a play, where her character enters her bedroom and has a violent crying spell on the floor. Just like Gustav’s desire to get close to the source of his family’s pain through film, the extremes of art’s emotions are only therapeutic to a point, channelling our pain to a point that may be compelling and affecting, but not necessarily restorative. Trier indulges in a string of film industry jokes – the ones about Netflix theatrical windows and Lasse Hallström are welcome, but Gustav gifting his nine-year-old grandson inappropriate DVDs of Irréversible and The Piano Teacher feels too acutely designed for a cineliterate crowd.

Fanning is capable as the sensitive A-lister who jumps at the chance to work with a real artist, but much like Rachel’s gradual realisation of the personal significance of Gustav’s film, Fanning understands she’s an outsider to the script’s (co-written by Trier and Eskil Vogt) most compelling drama. The film’s three stunted grown-ups each roam on their own paths of self-doubt, forcing each other, tearfully, to acknowledge the wounds they have let fester (following Gustav’s example, of course). It’s exhilarating to watch Skarsgård in a commanding role that calls on such fragility and unpleasantness (not to mention speaking a non-English language), and the quiet insights into the patriarch’s despair are well complemented by Reinsve, whose evocation of loneliness is etched into her body, waiting to flair up in the face of rejection or mistreatment. 

The discovery of the film is Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who infuses the more grounded Agnes (in contrast with Nora, she’s married with a kid and an academic job) with a curiosity that draws Agnes towards understanding why her father communicates the way he does, and why her family have put up with it with a far greater clarity than her sister. After Trier failed to give Julie meaningful female friendships or family in The Worst Person in the World, it’s a relief to see rich and fraught sisterhood take centre stage here. 

There are emotional strands that feel laboured – it doesn’t help that the snippets we hear of Gustav’s script sound obvious and tired – but Sentimental Value is so frequently and convincingly moving in how it zeroes in on the gaps in affection and acceptance that neglect creates within a family. If art wants to be redemptive, it needs to make honest and sincere connections between its players. It’s a familiar maxim that Trier makes lively again: art is not just excavation, but rather renewal.

Cinephilia, the ungainly term for loving films with which we must make do, has gained new life in the 2020s. The rise of Letterboxd, concurrent with the Covid lockdowns, has democratised film criticism and altered the way we view cinema. Being extremely into movies is no longer a niche hobby – it’s hot currency. In recent years, Tom Cruise has parlayed his deep, sincere love for cinema into top-tier PR spin and totally recharged his movie star power. And by opting for more thoughtful, artful projects, younger stars like Austin Butler and Mikey Madison are proving how much they value quality filmmaking over hawking some creatively bankrupt IP tentpole.

Now, we’ve been gifted two Hollywood send-ups in quick succession – HBO’s The Franchise, an ugly, laughless parody of Marvel filmmaking that committed the sin of wasting Lolly Adefope and the even greater sin of being written by Marina Hyde, was promptly cancelled. And then there’s The Studio, the brainchild of Seth Rogen and collaborators Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez, which arrived in March with far greater expectations and far more legitimacy.

Rogen is an unusual ferryman for a series about one man’s quest to keep quality cinema alive. His late-00s reign over the Judd Apatow brand of mid-budget comedy looks like high art compared to today’s lab-grown streaming fare, but Rogen was hardly an auteur. It means there’s an inescapable shimmer of hypocrisy hanging over The Studio. You can’t help but watch it with Rogen’s filmography – The Green Hornet, Sausage Party and Mufasa: The Lion King – all perched, devil-like, on your shoulder. The character he plays, film studio boss Matt Remick, may exalt Scorsese and GoodFellas, but the actor isn’t exactly in the business of making films that owe even the slightest debt to those influences.

The main issue with The Studio is that it peaks in its first half hour. Having Scorsese, a mesmerically good actor who needs to be cast more, appear as himself to get bullshitted around by Remick was borderline genius. Twisting the director’s Jonestown movie idea into a Barbie-style IP tentpole for Kool-Aid, then dropping him (and Steve Buscemi) was beyond inspired. An entire episode about Hollywood execs directly mishandling the final film by one of the greatest living filmmakers for the sake of a juice drink tie-in is exactly the high bar The Studio should have cleared every episode. Instead, we got diminishing variations of the idea – after Scorsese, it was Sarah Polley, then Ron Howard, then Olivia Wilde, then Parker Finn et al. There are some great jokes in all of the above (in particular, Wilde drawing on the Don’t Worry Darling furore by portraying herself as outright villainous), but a distinct lack of direction. 

If the ‘director of the week’ format starts to wear thin, the final two episodes’ descent into pure stoner farce is worse – it feels like a crutch and only affirms any concerns about Rogen overseeing a series with as much potential as this. The volume gets louder, the pratfalls are more liberally deployed, and it all starts to feel extremely lazy. The sharp tang of its first couple of episodes has been replaced with something softer and sillier, and less becoming. That final scene in the pilot, of Remick and his right-hand man Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), guiltily watching GoodFellas after making Martin Scorsese cry, feels very distant. 

This isn’t to say The Studio is a bust – it is often hysterically funny. It does occasionally circle back to something more barbed; namely, in the episode where Remick and his panicked execs debate the racial optics of their cast. And though the material gets increasingly safe, it is still material being sold by comedy heavyweights like Catherine O’Hara and Kathryn Hahn. It’s sharply directed, too – the long takes, while best used in the episode specifically about shooting a long take, are impressive, and it’s the rare streaming series that actually looks good. The Studio is maybe the easiest watch of the year, the episodes blurring by. But after its brief, insubstantial finale, it feels too settled, having bared its teeth early on, then retracted them for easier, victim-free targets like the pageantry and behind-the-scenes to-ing and fro-ing of awards ceremonies.

The moment it was clear The Studio would never truly upset the Hollywood apple cart was when Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos appeared as himself – on a rival streaming platform, no less! – at the series’ fictitious Golden Globes. While Netflix sweeps the fictional awards ceremony, Sarandos is fictionally showered with fictional praise by real actors in their fictional speeches (later revealed to be for contractual reasons, har har) and he is, of course, treated with kid gloves. Yes, Sarandos is one of the most influential power players in Hollywood and someone keen to ensure no film ever premieres in a cinema again – but look, he referred to himself as a “bean counter” and actors as “artists”. 

It’s confirmation enough that there is nothing at stake in The Studio; The Rehearsal this is not. And in positioning Remick as a parallel to Sarandos – they’re just two men who adore cinema and simply want the best for the industry – the show feels less like a witty parody of contemporary Hollywood and more like back-patting damage control. According to the show’s murky thesis, people like Remick and Sarandos wouldn’t be greenlighting films like Kool-Aid or Netflix’s The Electric State if they had a choice! But the post-Covid moviegoing recovery has continued like gangbusters – from Barbie and Oppenheimer to Wicked and Sinners – so the desire for something that isn’t pure slop is there. It’s difficult to swallow The Studio’s argument that execs are only following current trends and not setting them. 

In the series’ final episode, Remick’s inebriated boss (Bryan Cranston) is unable to complete an on-stage speech, so he and the gang turn his first word – “Movies!” – into a celebratory chant. “Movies! Movies! Movies!” they cheer in unison. When in doubt, play into people’s love for movies; it is, after all, why we’re all here. That’s exactly what The Studio did – while it distracted us with some very funny celebrity cameos and timely references to A24 and The Town With Matthew Belloni, it operated as a substantial bit of Hollywood reputation laundering. And it worked like a charm, because we’re still at the point where chanting, “Movies! Movies! Movies!” is enough. 

The Studio season one is available to stream on Apple TV+ now. 

We’re all familiar with the hopeful sentiments shared online early in the pandemic – that it was an opportunity to reset, to organise society differently, to return to our social lives with a renewed respect for each other and our differences. Five years on, Ari Aster’s smart but frustrating satire Eddington looks back at the pandemic with a misanthropic lens, recasting those aspirations as infantile and naive, while firmly placing Covid as the genesis of our current nightmare, where technology and disinformation have driven impassible rifts through even the quietest communities.

Eddington is the hot, dry, 2,000-strong New Mexico town in which Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is the sheriff and Ted (Pedro Pascal) is the mayor. The film opens in May 2020 as Joe – increasingly isolated from his wife Louise (a coldly brilliant but underused Emma Stone), and gathering confidence in his anti-mask, anti-government views – begins an impulsive bid for mayor against Ted. This rivalry sets the town of Eddington on a chaotic and violent path, as Joe and Ted’s opposing politics are entangled with local Black Lives Matter protests, the development of an artificial intelligence data centre outside town, and Louise’s attraction to a charismatic cult leader (a hilarious – and also underused – Austin Butler).

It’s a lot to pack into one movie, but Eddington’s main fault isn’t that it’s overstuffed – it’s that Aster introduces the audience to this broad plot at an initially sluggish pace, plodding through introductions to the ensemble with a surprising lack of wit and energy. However, the story starts to coalesce around a mid-point standoff between Joe and Ted at a barbecue, as they wordlessly grapple over the volume levels of Katy Perry’s Firework. It’s a masterstroke of comic tension, and the scene tilts Eddington propulsively towards its chaotic, cathartic second half.

Aster meticulously recreates the pandemic through uncomfortably familiar details; a striking early image depicts Eddington residents queuing outside a supermarket, spaced five feet apart while an enlarged, grinning Pascal beams down from a reelection mural. Aster also pays close attention to how people looked to their phones for a sense of comfort and connection during lockdown, but also how our phones failed to provide this. Our introduction to Joe finds him watching a reel about how to convince one’s partner to start a family, a clue to his growing distance from Louise. Shortly after, as Joe crawls into bed next to a wooden, awkward Louise, the camera tilts uncomfortably sideways – at exactly the angle you might hold your phone while doomscrolling in bed.

Aster’s integration of screens in the film’s visual language is both elegant and disorienting in a way few filmmakers have been able to achieve in the iPhone era. Several times, certain shots appear at first to be part of the film’s live timeline, before a zoom-out reveals them to be content on a character’s phone. It’s one of several ways Aster evokes the distorted truths of 2020 and, as Joe becomes increasingly mistrustful and impulsive, we witness just how easy it is for someone to manipulate this confusion for their benefit. It’s difficult to indicate the direction all this heads in without revealing pivotal spoilers, but suffice to say these simmering tensions turn Eddington (the town) into a surreal, violent playground, and Eddington (the movie) into something more tonally akin to Aster’s previous film, Beau is Afraid.

Throughout Eddington, Aster’s strength is his understanding of the way people felt the need to blame someone, or something, for the disruption wrought by the pandemic, and how this in turn led to everyone feeling like victims, regardless of how true or constructive that victimhood might have been. In one particularly sharp – and deeply uncomfortable – scene, as the Black Lives Matter protests are growing in size in Eddington, white high schooler Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) yells in the face of the sheriff’s Black trainee Michael (Michael Ward) about her privilege. Notably, her words focus on how her whiteness has failed her personally, not the world around her. 

Ultimately, the character with the largest victim complex is Joe, and Phoenix taps expertly into the same sense of confusion and fear he brought to Beau is Afraid. He’s the butt of the joke for much of Eddington, but towards the end of the film, Aster positions his paranoia and anger at the world as a nightmare we’re all complicit in. Five years on from that historical turning point, Eddington argues that the pandemic did indeed give society a reset – but as technology warped our understanding of reality, it wasn’t the reset we needed.