I reviewed “The Brutalist” earlier this week and told you it was worth every minute of its three-and-a-half-hour running time. I stand by that. But I also understand that not everyone has an evening to give to a film about the cost of artistic ambition in postwar America, no matter how good it is. Some nights you want something that grabs you in the first five minutes and doesn’t let go until the credits roll. Some nights you want to have fun at the movies, even if the movie theater is your living room.

Sean Baker’s “Anora” is that film. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2024, and it earned it. If you haven’t watched it yet, if the streaming algorithms have been nudging you past it in favor of something with a recognizable franchise logo, I’m telling you now: stop scrolling. This is the one. It is the most purely alive movie I’ve seen in years, and I don’t use that word often. Most movies are competent. Some are beautiful. Very few feel alive the way a conversation with a fascinating stranger feels alive, unpredictable and specific and charged with the energy of not knowing what comes next.

Here is what you need to know without me telling you too much. Mikey Madison plays Ani, a young woman who works at a strip club in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She meets Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch, played by Mark Eydelshteyn with the particular confidence of a twenty-three-year-old who has never been told no by anyone who mattered. They have a very good time together. They go to Las Vegas. They get married. Then Ivan’s family finds out, and the rest of the movie is what happens when a woman who has fought for everything she has collides with a family that has never had to fight for anything at all.

I won’t tell you how it goes. I will tell you that the first hour plays like a romance that runs on pure electricity, the second hour plays like a comedy that keeps threatening to become something else entirely, and the final stretch does something I did not see coming. Baker earns that ending. He earns it because he has spent the whole film making you care about Ani, not as a symbol or a social type, but as a particular person with a particular voice and a way of moving through the world that does not bend for anyone. When the film arrives at its final moments, you feel the weight of everything she’s been carrying, and you feel it because Baker trusted you to pay attention.

Madison’s performance is the reason the whole thing works. If you know her at all, it’s probably from a small part in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” where she made an impression in about four minutes of screen time. Here she carries the entire film, and she doesn’t carry it like a weight. She carries it like a dare. Ani is funny and sharp and profane and stubborn, and Madison plays her without a single moment of condescension toward the character, without ever winking at the audience to say, “Isn’t she colorful?” Ani isn’t colorful. Ani is a person. That is a harder thing to play than it looks, and Madison makes it look easy, which is the surest sign that it isn’t.

Baker has been building toward this movie for a decade. If you’ve seen “The Florida Project,” his 2017 film about a six-year-old living in a motel outside Disney World, you know what he does: he finds people living on the margins and films them with warmth and specificity that most directors save for their most sympathetic characters. He doesn’t sentimentalize. He doesn’t lecture you about inequality or poverty. He shows you a life and trusts you to see it clearly. “Tangerine,” his 2015 film shot entirely on iPhones, did the same thing with two transgender women in Hollywood on Christmas Eve. Baker’s camera loves the people it watches. It isn’t pity and it isn’t voyeurism. It’s the attention of a director who finds human beings genuinely interesting, which is rarer in cinema than you’d expect.

“Anora” is his biggest canvas yet, and the scale suits him. The film moves through Brooklyn and Las Vegas and back again, through nightclubs and mansions and a Coney Island that looks exactly like Coney Island always looks, beautiful and a little worn down and completely itself. You can feel the difference between Ani’s apartment and Ivan’s family’s house, and that difference tells you everything the screenplay doesn’t need to spell out.

I keep thinking about this film alongside older ones, because that’s how my mind works, and the comparison that keeps returning is Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” from 1986. Demme’s film starts as a screwball comedy. A straitlaced businessman, played by Jeff Daniels, gets pulled into a wild afternoon by a stranger he meets at a diner, and about two-thirds of the way through, the whole thing shifts. It gets darker. It gets real. The tonal change feels dangerous, like the floor just tilted. “Anora” does something similar, though Baker’s shift is less about genre and more about emotion. The first half is exhilarating, a love story between two people performing versions of themselves they can’t sustain. The second half is what happens when the performance ends and the real power dynamics emerge. Baker handles the shift with a confidence that reminds me of the best American filmmakers of the seventies and eighties, directors who trusted audiences to follow them into territory that wasn’t signposted in advance.

The supporting cast deserves mention. Yura Borisov plays Igor, one of the men sent to handle the situation on behalf of Ivan’s family, and he gives a performance of extraordinary quiet. In a movie full of people yelling and scheming and throwing furniture, Borisov barely raises his voice, and every scene he’s in becomes more interesting because of it. There is something happening behind his eyes that the film is smart enough not to explain, and Borisov is smart enough not to oversell. It’s the kind of work that sneaks up on you. You don’t realize how much he’s doing until the film is over and you can’t stop thinking about him.

Let me be direct about who this movie is for, because that’s my job. If you need your evenings quiet and contemplative, this isn’t the one. “Anora” is loud. It is profane. There is nudity and sex and people screaming at each other in Russian and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It earns every bit of it. Nothing is there for shock. But if any of that is a dealbreaker, I’d rather tell you now than have you turn it off thirty minutes in.

If none of that is a dealbreaker, you are in for one of the best evenings you’ll spend in front of a screen this year. “Anora” is just over two hours long, and not one of those minutes is wasted. It’s a movie that respects your time by refusing to waste a second of its own. And it sends you out feeling like you just experienced something real, something made by a filmmaker who loves movies and loves the people in them and trusted you to feel the same way.

That’s all I ever ask of a film. Go watch this one tonight.