I love how Mikey Madison says everything in Anora, an adrenalized new comedy where she plays the eponymous character, but it’s how she says “fraud marriage” that especially stays with me. The 23-year-old says it like “fro-awed mah-ridge” because she hails from Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn borough where she lives in a rickety, train-track-neighboring house with her sister, and she says it with indelible aghastness early in the movie because she’s accused of being in one before she’s even properly gotten to bask in the glow of recent nuptials that, to her eye, are definitely valid.

Anora, Sean Baker’s first movie since the 2021 black comedy Red Rocket, spends most of its shaggy, nearly two-and-a-half-hour-long runtime seeing its title character fight to prove that validity with scrappy aplomb honed by years of sticking up for herself in male-dominated spaces. Long story short: This dark-haired exotic dancer who much prefers to be called Ani caught the eye of Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the boyishly rosy-cheeked son of some richer-than-God Russian oligarchs she had to Google, at the Manhattan club where she works. After a whirlwind and handsomely paid-for week together, they got married in Las Vegas’ Little White Chapel.

Read the full review at South Sound.