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2024 was the year that Sean Baker and his stories of America's overlooked and underprivileged finally got the spotlight they deserved. The director has consistently crafted empathetic and strikingly naturalistic movies based on the lives of marginalized figures ever since his first film, "Four Letter Words," was released in 2000. Mainstream success somewhat eluded him in the two decades that followed, but each of his projects helped raise his profile, with 2015's "Tangerine" in particular gaining notoriety for being shot entirely on an iPhone 5S. 2017's "The Florida Project" was an American neorealist masterpiece, while 2021's "Red Rocket" was yet another critical success, even if it didn't quite propel Baker into the mainstream consciousness.

But "Anora," Baker's high-stress screwball comedy, was easily one of the best movies of 2024 and it seems the Academy agreed, with the film winning Best Picture at the 2025 Oscars. Star Mikey Madison also gave the 2025 Oscars its most...

Quick LinksWhat is The Florida Project About?The Race For Sean Baker's BestThe Florida Project and Anora Have Different Oscars Stories

As exciting as the movie awards season is every year, it is undeniable that sometimes the Academy voters make mistakes. Whether it's in Best Picture, Acting, Director, or one of the below-the-line categories, sometimes the Academy hivemind rallies behind a completely wrong winner. A recent example can be found at the 2019 Oscars ceremony, when Peter Farrelly's Green Book ran away with the victory, leaving audiences everywhere confused. Aside from the long Adrien Brody speeches and general displeasure at Emilia Perez existing, fans can take solace in the fact that this year's Academy Awards got it right with Anora.

Anora stunned audiences with its comedy, romance, and genuinely heart-shattering fall to reality during the finale. The film balances tone like none other and flawlessly communicates a truly important message.

After dedicating his entire filmography to an overlooked portion of America, Sean Baker has finally gotten the recognition he deserved. His movie Anora not only brought home the prestigious Palme d'Or but also won a Best Picture award at the Oscars. In addition, Baker received awards for the film's editing, screenplay, and most notoriously, for achievement in directing.

Anora and Sean Baker's wins are a symbolic win for indie cinema overall. It shows that everyone who starts small can dream big. Baker has always advocated for the importance of watching movies on the big screen and for stories about minorities and the oppressed. Anora and the seven movies he'd made before it share an important, singular message while dealing with a variety of topics and characters from different backgrounds: the only thing society can't take from us is our humanity. Here is every movie directed by Sean Baker, from worst to best.

Sean Baker had a history-making night at the Oscars, winning Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Director, and Best Picture for "Anora," while star Mikey Madison took home the statue for Best Actress for her performance as Ani. As a result, Baker had four opportunities to speak to the world at large through his acceptance speeches, and he came prepared. He encouraged audiences to watch movies on the big screen since independent theaters need support now more than ever, at the same time promoting the importance of independent cinema and telling unique stories. He also, given the subject of "Anora," opened his night by thanking the sex work community.

"I want to thank the sex worker community. They have shared their stories. They have shared their life experience with me over the years. My deepest respect. Thank you — I share this with you," he said. Madison echoed the sentiment in her own acceptance speech,...

Director who made his name with microbudget indie films wins with his self-penned drama about a lapdancer who falls for one of her clients

Oscars 2025 — follow live Academy Awards updatesSee complete list of winners and photos from the red carpet

Sean Baker has won the best director Oscar for Anora at the Academy Awards, which are taking place in Los Angeles, California.

A romance/thriller about a lapdancer who impulsively marries a Russian playboy, Anora stars Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn. It is Baker’s eighth feature, having made his debut with the microbudget indie Four Letter Words in 2000, and his fourth film since making a breakthrough in 2015 with Tangerine, a drama about trans sex workers shot on iPhones.

Anora wins best original and Conclave wins best adapted screenplay

Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña win supporting prizes

No Other Land wins best documentary andFlow wins best animated feature

Continue reading.

Academy Award goes to writer-director of film starring Mikey Madison as a dancer who gets married to a Russian playboy

Oscars 2025 — follow live Academy Awards updatesSee complete list of winners and photos from the red carpet

Anora has won the Academy Award for best original screenplay, with the film’s writer-director Sean Baker taking the honours.

A romance/thriller about a lapdancer who impulsively marries a Russian playboy, Anora stars Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn. It is Baker’s eighth feature, having made his debut with the microbudget indie Four Letter Words in 2000, and his fourth film since making a breakthrough in 2015 with Tangerine, a drama about trans sex workers shot on iPhones.

Anora wins best original and Conclave wins best adapted screenplay

Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña win supporting prizes

Flow wins best animated feature

Halle Berry ‘pays back’ Adrien Brody for 2003 Oscars kiss...

Sean Baker’s fans would hail him as a pioneer of empathetic cinema in the modern day, and his detractors would dismiss him as a two-bit purveyor of poverty porn. One thing that neither side can deny, however, is that Sean Baker has become one of the defining voices of independent American cinema in the 21st century. A filmmaker who’s taken his cues from all over the history of the medium—from kitchen sink realism to exploitation films—and melded them together into his proper vision, Baker’s world is one distinctly defined by its proximity to our very own.

Looking across the totality of Baker’s filmography, there are certainly recurring themes and motifs that make their way from beginning to end—poverty, resilience, Karren Karagulian—but each one of his films stands on its own in their idiosyncrasies and how they choose to tackle these ideas. No two Baker protagonists are interchangeable,...

All you need to know about the five directors in the running for the Academy’s prestigious film-making prize, along with reviews of their nominated films, interviews and the awards they’ve earned so far

• Full list of Oscar nominations

Track record: Baker came out of the US’s microbudget/indie subculture; his first feature, Four Letter Words, was released way back in 2000. But it took a decade and a half for Baker to make a serious breakthrough; Tangerine, shot on iPhones, was the story of a trans sex worker (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), and won Baker some high-profile awards. His follow-up, The Florida Project, another account of marginalised Americans became a fixture on the awards circuit, bagging co-star Willem Dafoe an Oscar nom for best supporting actor. His next film, Red Rocket, premiered in competition at Cannes.

Sean Baker’s sex-worker odyssey “Anora” is steady as they go in the awards race heading into 2025, with a total box office over $15 million and nearly 200 nominations from the Golden Globes, key guilds, and critics’ groups. And that Palme d’Or win back at Cannes in May 2024 sealed the deal, too, marking Neon’s fifth consecutive claim of the festival’s top prize.

The 25-year-old Mikey Madison gives the performance of her career as Ani, a New York exotic dancer swept off her feet and into a sham marriage to wily party animal Vanya. She’s joined by Russian star Yura Borisov and Armenian actors Vache Tovmasyan and Karren Karagulian, the latter a stalwart collaborator of Baker’s dating back to the filmmaker’s feature debut, “Four Letter Words” from 2000. With Karagulian as Vanya’s scene-stealing godfather Toros, Borisov and Tovmasyan play henchmen dispatched to New York by Vanya’s...

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts fueling the year’s most talked-about movies continues with Neon’s Anora, a zany romantic comedy written and directed by Sean Baker. The film, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, stars Mikey Madison as Anora, a sex worker from Brooklyn whose life takes an unexpected turn when she meets and impulsively marries the son of a billionaire oligarch.

Neon released Anora on October 18, and it has grossed $29.5 million to date at the global box office. The pic has been a major presence during awards season, having scored a co-leading five Indie Spirit Awards nominations, seven Critics Choice noms and five Golden Globe noms including for directing and screenplay, and Best Picture. The Los Angeles Film Critics named it film of the year, and it’s on several Top 10 lists including AFI‘s.

Set over three contrasting acts,...

Sean Baker broke some news to IndieWire at the red carpet of the Gotham Awards in New York City December 2. The “Anora” director shared that several of his earlier films are getting Criterion Collection releases — and that he hopes to get his next film off the ground “Asap.”

The Palme d’Or winner has made no secret of his love for Criterion in the past, being one of the first directors to visit the Criterion Closet back in 2015 and sharing his Top 10 titles from the Collection around the same time for Criterion’s website. He also spoke at length to IndieWire about his belief that a love of older movies informs his own skillset as a filmmaker.

But to date, Baker only has one title that’s received a physical Criterion Collection release, his 2004 breakout film “Take Out,” which he co-directed with Shih Ching-Tsou. More, however, are on the way.

“Anora,” the winner of the 2024 Palme d’Or, is a film that’s all too easy to describe as a star is born moment. The film, a madcap romance between the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch and a Brighton Beach sex worker that channels everything from the screwball comedies of Ernst Lubitsch to the intimate neo-realist dramas of Federico Fellini features a performance from Mikey Madison in the lead role that feels destined to raise the “Better Things” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” star’s profile immediately.

Beyond its leading lady, “Anora” also feels like it’s destined to be the moment where its director Sean Baker goes from indie darling to award darling. Baker, who made his directorial debut in the year 2000 with the obscure “Four Letter Words,” has slowly risen in stature for years now. After three more features — “Take Out,” “Prince of Broadway,...

At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, director Sean Baker won the Palme d’Or when his romantic drama Anora was chosen as the Best Feature Film of the Official Competition. The movie has been generating Oscar buzz ever since, with Variety reporting that lead actress Mikey Madison could be one of the “few sure-fire bets” in the Best Actress category, while Baker could end up being nominated as producer, director, writer, and editor. That all remains to be seen, but soon enough we’ll find out how a wider audience responds to the film, as Neon (the distributor behind Best Picture winner Parasite) will be giving Anora a theatrical release this Friday, October 18th. With just a few days to go until that date arrives, a new trailer for the film has been unveiled, and you can check that out in the embed above.

The story Baker crafted for...

Sean Baker is amazed some people still think he’s a new filmmaker. That implies that he’s young. On the contrary. “I’m old,” Baker remarked during his talk at Ifp Week 2017. (Or at least he’s 46.) Back in 2015, Tangerine put him on the map. And it was shot on an iPhone 5S, which made him seem like some millennial who’d never even heard of a Bolex. As it happens, Tangerine was his fifth film. The others weren’t obscure; Four Letter Words, Take Out, Prince of Broadway and Starlet were all acclaimed. (He also spent years as the co-creator of […]...

Besides being a successful actress and loving wife and mother, Blake Lively is also quite the fierce competitor!

During “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” last night (June 20), the “Gossip Girl” babe looked incredible in a slim-fitting blue dress as she engaged in a heated round of “Know It All.”

Throughout the game, Lively, who has been busy promoting her new movie “The Shallows,” was too proper to drop any curse words, hence she didn’t do too well with the “Four Letter Words” category. Check the clip!

Sean Baker wills his films into the world.  He fearlessly shot his new film "Tangerine" entirely on the iPhone 5s. It dazzled audiences and critics when it premiered at Sundance 2015 and is now being released theatrically. It looks great on the big screen and has energy and style to burn. Using the iPhone was the most affordable way to shoot Tangerine, and turned out to be the very best way to make it.  Read More: How the Dp Behind Sundance Hit 'Tangerine' Created a Cinematic Look with an iPhone Baker shot his first feature "Four Letter Words" in 1996 and finally finished it in 2000. Made for $80,000 with 35mm short ends, it's the only movie he has done on film. In 2004, he shot "Take Out" on standard definition video for $3,000 and "finished it with favors." In 2008, he made "Prince of Broadway on HD" for $45,000. Then in 2012, he completed "Starlet," which...

Filmmaker Sean Baker (Four Letter Words, Take Out, Prince of Broadway, Starlet) premiered his new film Tangerine at the Library theater Friday at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. A Q&A followed the screening during which Baker revealed that the film was shot entirely using three iPhone 5S phones. (Update: Our original story said “almost entirely,” […]

The post Sundance Shocker: Sean Baker’s Tangerine Was Shot Entirely on iPhone 5s appeared first on /Film.

The scrooge in me doesn’t care much for Xmas themed films. But worry not, this Christmas without snow will surely bring out the yuletide spirit. Following Four Letter Words, Take Out, Prince of Broadway and Starlet, on paper, Sean Baker’s fifth feature film promises more of the same: an immersive experience with characters you’d never thought you had a rapport with in a scape you probably didn’t know existed. Think street National Geographic style d examinations of the human condition. A featured Ioncinephile filmmaker, Baker began filming Tangerine very early in the year, and as usual, we find a mix of non-actors (stars newbies Kiki Lee Key and Mya Taylor) with a seasoned pro in James Ransone.

Gist: Co-scripted with Chris Bergoch, this is a rip-roaring journey through various subcultures of Tinseltown on Christmas Eve.

Production Co./Producers: Sean Baker, Through Films’ Marcus and Karrie Cox,...

"Hollywood Game Night" returns on Thursday (Feb. 27) with a new episode, and Zap2it has an exclusive first look at the shenanigans that are going down.

In the above clip, Sean Hayes, Olivia Wilde and Christina Applegate play a rousing team game of Four Letter Words. They work impressively well together.

While the video showcases the fun the "Hollywood Game Night" guests have together, now viewers have share in the excitement at home. The "Hollywood Game Night" party game hit store shelves on Feb. 15 and can be purchased at Walmart and the NBC online store.

"Hollywood Game Night" airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. Et/Pt on NBC.

Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of visionary filmmakers? As part of our monthly Ioncinephile profile (read here), we ask the filmmaker the incredibly arduous task of identifying their top ten list of favorite films. Sean Baker (Four Letter Words (’00), Take Out (’04), Prince of Broadway (’08) and the just released Starlet), provided us with his all time top ten film list (dated: November 2012).

Babes in Toyland (aka March of Wooden Soldiers) – Gus Meins, Charley Rogers (1932)

“Gus Meins and Charley Rogers’ masterpiece. The comedic timing and images have passed the test of time… that poor monkey playing a bastard Mickey Mouse. And even in this age of advanced make-up and computer effects, show a child that Bogeymen sequence and I guarantee there will be nightmares.“

Bad Lieutenant – Abel Ferrara (1990)

“Ferrara’s masterpiece. I love NYC films and this truly captured the city’s vibe of the late 80′s,...

Oncinema.com’s Ioncinephile of the Month feature focuses on an emerging filmmaker from the world of cinema. This November, we feature Sean Baker, an independent filmmaker whose fourth film, Starlet premiered at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, then continued onwards to Locarno, BFI London and most recently AFI Film Fest before being released theatrically via Music Box Films on Friday November 9th. Below is our follow-up interview where we learn more about Baker’s process and about the films that have influenced the filmmaker. Here’s Sean Baker’s personal Top Ten films of all time.

Eric Lavallee: During your childhood…what films were important to you?

Sean Baker: When I was in first grade, my mother brought me to the local library where they were screening selected scenes from the Universal monster films on 16mm. I remember watching the burning windmill sequence from James Whale’s...

No matter the scale of the production, American cinema largely reflects the conditions of a society that still has a hard time exploring its diversity. To put it simply: A lot of movies are made by white guys and revolve around white guys. American filmmaker Sean Baker is a white guy, but the four features he has written and directed over the last decade delve far deeper into the crevices of a country that contains many more stories beyond the market standard. Baker maintains a firm grasp of genre -- as his other career, creating the dopey comedy shows "Greg the Bunny" and "Warren the Ape" prove -- but applies it to unorthodox ends. While both his scrappy first feature, the college romp "Four Letter Words," and his latest effort, "Starlet" (which opens in limited release this Friday), revolve around archetypes of American youth, these familiar access points provide fluid...

If you haven't yet noticed, I updated all the Oscar charts yesterday to reflect the latest shifts in buzz. As ever I am not totally enslaved by immediate buzz but try to project forward from it. I don't believe, and past experience backs me up here, that the first word from festivals is the last word on consensus. Festival audiences have, in many cases, different needs than Academy voters and the general public and even mainstream-leaning film critics.  These differing needs range from subject matter to tone to emotional and intellectual content. So there is much we still don't know about the new films winning raves. To win Oscar's heart you generally have to first master or at least make peace with three other audiences (all of which can or do overlap with each other and with Oscar but let's not complicate the matter): Critics (i.e. reviews/perceptions...

Sometimes hitting the multiplex just isn’t in the cards. That’s when Netflix steps in to provide a movie fix. But how to separate the wheat from the chaff? I’m happy to help; every week I’ll pick a flick from the Netflix Watch Instantly section and see if it’s worth your time. This week? “Love and Other Four Letter Words”.

She’s a busy career woman that has left her past behind so she can blossom in the big city. She’s got everything she’s ever wanted, except love. No, it’s not Sweet Home Alabama, Never Been Kissed or Meet The Browns. This time it’s Love and Other Four Letter Words, and it’s a shadow of the movies that have come before it.

The she in this movie is television talk show host Stormy La Rue (and I’m assuming that’s...

Usama Alshaibi’s Profane debuted in Berlin last week and the film already garnered a review by Ceven Knowles. To be honest, I haven’t read it yet because I’m waiting to see the film first without preconceptions. But, I think it’s a positive write-up.Actually, there are lots of write-ups coming from the Berlinale. On Electric Sheep, Pamela Jahn and Alison Frank review films Road to Nowhere, The Devil’s Double, Tomboy and Dance Town.Robert Koehler has several write-ups. First, he says Miranda July’s The Future isn’t good, but Marie Losier’s The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is excellent. Then, this round-up of several films makes the fest sound pretty dismal overall.Kinemastik reviews some Berlinale short films.Clint Enns has a completely excellent review of Jaimz Asmundson’s phenomenal short film The Magus, cluing us in on many of the fine...

A lot of hay has been made lately about the future of Netflix streaming movies over the Internet for its subscribers as opposed to their original business model of being a mail-order DVD rental service. A good recent article on the subject was written by Chuck Tryon, who waded through all the hype and arguments against to try to figure out what impact Internet streaming of movies has on the movie industry.

Well, forget about the industry for the moment. How is Netflix streaming affecting the underground filmmaker?

Personally, I’m not a Netflix subscriber, so wading through their offerings is a bit more difficult for me. However, I was still curious if the company was streaming any underground movies. To find out if they were, I ended up searching a website called Instant Watcher, which is a company independent of Netflix, but uses a Netflix developer Api to scan...

Getting a little less attention than glossier fare like "The Avengers" and "Cowboys & Aliens" in the four-day firestorm of Comic-Con unveilings the past weekend was the announcement that "A Contract With God" was headed to the big screen, indie-style.

Will Eisner's masterpiece, which consists of four semi-autobiographical short stories set in the Bronx and its environs in the 1930s, is considered a landmark of the form. It's one of the main texts, along with "Watchmen" and "Maus," that gets brought up by people making the case for the potential of comic books and graphic novels as art forms.

Each of the four parts of "A Contract With God" will be handled, anthology-style, by one of four up-and-coming indie filmmakers. The dream team and the segments they'll each handle:

Sean Baker: "Cookalien"

One of the creators of the "Greg the Bunny" franchise, formerly of IFC, then Fox, then IFC again,...

Artist Rob Seward creates a stunning type display using fluorescent light tubes, with words borrowed from an eerie experiment that began in the 1970s.

Rob Seward's installation, Four Letter Words, is comprised of four units, each of them made from fluorescent lights that can rearranged themselves to render all 26 letters of the alphabet:

The sheer form of the letters themselves is startling to watch, as they fade from one letter to the next.

But the piece gets part of its eerie poetry from the words themselves, which displays the results from a word-association database that was assembled at the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998, in hopes of mapping how the mind free-associates. (The attempt failed: Despite crunching answers from over 6,000 people, the researchers weren't able to successfully predict what words people would cross associate.) Apparently, Seward also programmed the words to drift towards "dark" subject matter, following in the...

Prince of Broadway Directed by Sean Baker Prince Of Broadway, the third feature from writer/director Sean Baker (Take Out, Four Letter Words) continues in the minimal, neo-realist vein of his previous films, a slice-of-street-life indie that places a human face on a character not normally seen in mainstream film. The film revolves around the New York world of bootleg apparel, following Lucky  (Prince Adu), an illegal immigrant from West Africa who works as a hustler selling counterfeit purses and sneakers for his Armenian-Lebanese boss Levon (Karren Karagulian). Lucky is confronted at work by an ex-girlfriend (Kat Sanchez) who drops an 18-month-old (Aiden Noesi) into his arms, claiming the child is his, and then disappears. Things get complicated from there. Lucky tries to do the right thing, but he's ill-prepared for the sudden responsibility, and things don't go exactly as planned. Winner of the best narrative feature award at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival,...