The new Pretty Woman? This wild caper a couple of stripper and a shady high-roller is much cleverer, BRIAN VINER writes

Anora (18, 139 mins) 

Verdict: Hilarious and touching 

Rating:

Every so often, and I grant it doesn’t happen much, a bunch of terrific new films all come along at the same time. 

They’re like those proverbial London buses, arriving in convoy just when you were beginning to think you might never see one again.

Anyway, this week’s releases are a counterblast to the complaint that we film critics hear constantly, as if we were responsible, that there’s never anything in the cinema worth watching. 

Just the usual dispiriting diet of feeble sequels and superhero nonsense, you say; and sometimes it’s hard to disagree.

But not today. In fact there might be more stars on these pages than I’ve ever dished out in a single week, starting with the full complement for the fabulous Anora, which deservedly won the coveted Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Writer and director Sean Baker — who comes from Summit, New Jersey — has reached the top of his game with this funny, sad, touching, energetic, relevant, altogether engrossing tale of a bright, spirited ‘erotic dancer’, the titular Anora, gloriously played by Mikey Madison.

One night, at the New York City lap-dancing club where she plies her trade, Anora, known to her friends as Ani, so beguiles Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the engagingly puppyish but entirely feckless son of a shady Russian oligarch, that he offers to pay for her ‘company’ for a whole week.

Her workmates tell her she’s won the Lotto, especially when he goes even further, whisking her off to Las Vegas. There, on a cocaine-fuelled whim, they get married.

Helpfully, Ani speaks half-decent Russian herself, learnt at her immigrant grandmother’s knee.

Fleetingly, she thinks that maybe she has wound up in a proper Cinderella story, destined for a happy ending. 

But that illusion doesn’t last long. When Vanya’s parents back in the mother country hear what’s happened they despatch some US-based goons to resolve the problem.

The resulting caper is hilarious but also laced with tenderness, and Baker steers our empathy in some surprising directions.

I admire all his previous films, and loved The Florida Project (2017), but he has excelled himself this time, with the story and the screenplay, and also the casting.

Frankly, I’d give Madison the Oscar now for Best Actress. But the young Russian actor Eydelshteyn matches her with what, I gather, was a partly improvised performance. 

This effervescently entertaining movie has been called an updated Pretty Woman (1990). But it’s much cleverer and more thought-provoking than that.

Heretic (15, 110 mins) 

Verdict: Classy horror-thriller 

Rating:

Heretic is a belter too, a gripping, intelligent horror-thriller ideal for those who like to see something scary in Halloween week. 

It teases us with dread and menace, both rising slowly but inexorably like flood water, after a pair of keen young Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), turn up in the obligatory horror-movie rainstorm on the doorstep of an isolated house.

It is the home of Mr Reed (Hugh Grant), who has previously declared an interest in their church. 

He seems jovial and charming, and the news that his wife is in the kitchen baking a wholesome blueberry pie, which they can smell, is all they need to tempt them over the threshold to do some gentle proselytising.

Yet pretty soon they are out of their depth; at first less bodily than intellectually, as Mr Reed counters their well-rehearsed patter with his own theological convictions.

 He’s smart and amusing, creatively using songs by The Hollies and Radiohead, and various iterations of the board game Monopoly, to challenge religious orthodoxies.

Yet the physical threat gradually takes shape, building towards an ending that is perhaps 25 per cent too overwrought, but electrifying all the same.

The writer-directors are Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, matching their work on the brilliant A Quiet Place (2018). And again the casting is spot on. 

Thatcher and East are both tremendous, but Grant steals the show, giving a perfectly calibrated performance as he continues to bury memories of all those affable middle-class fops with another first-rate study in villainy.

Small Things Like These (12A, 98 mins)

Verdict: Pitch-perfect adaptation

Rating:

Religion gets another bad rap in Small Things Like These, a satisfyingly faithful adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed 2021 novel.

The story is set in 1985 in a small Irish town, where a kindly, introspective coal merchant (Cillian Murphy) comes face to face with the wrongdoings of the Catholic Church, or more specifically those of the local convent’s imperious Mother Superior (Emily Watson), igniting recollections of his own upbringing.

I thought Keegan’s book was a small masterpiece and so in its way is the film, sensitively adapted by playwright Enda Walsh, gently directed by Tim Mielants, and led beautifully, heartrendingly, by the splendid Murphy.

All films in cinemas now.

ALSO SHOWING  

Writer-director Steve McQueen has said he was inspired to write Blitz (12A, 120 mins, ****) after seeing a faded photograph of a black child with other evacuees at the height of the Luftwaffe’s bombing onslaught against London. 

That prompted him to create an East End family of three, whose story he tells in this thoroughly enjoyable blend of fact and fiction.

Single mum Rita (the excellent Saoirse Ronan) shares a terraced house with her mixed-race, nine-year-old son George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan), and her dad Gerald (convincingly played by musician Paul Weller in his screen-acting debut).

It is September 1940; race and racism loom large. But in essence Blitz is an old-fashioned adventure story, about a spirited kid who rebels when his devoted mother reluctantly decides that he must be evacuated, jumping off the train whisking him to safety and finding his arduous way home.

Blitz is a chronicle of that return trip, which predictably, for dramatic purposes, is fraught with peril, with Stephen Graham popping up as a kind of wartime Bill Sikes.

I first reviewed Blitz during last month’s London Film Festival and had only one reservation: a Nigerian ARP warden (Benjamin Clementine), though based on a real person, seemed to me to make a wholly confected monologue about racial tolerance.

But the producer contacted me and explained that the lines were lifted from actual diaries, so I humbly stand down. 

 I still think the film depicts racism a bit one-dimensionally, but it’s a cracking yarn, very nicely told.

All the most compelling stories have at least an element of truth, or, like Super/Man: the Christopher Reeve Story (****), are entirely factual. 

This is a fascinating, hugely moving documentary about the actor who seemed to have everything going for him until the fateful day in May 1995 when he was thrown by his horse and ended up paralysed.

It so happens that I sat next to him watching the Oscars just a few weeks earlier at a party in New York, and like everyone else there could not fail to be struck by his sheer alpha-maleness. 

So I have always felt a minor personal connection with his story, which is told here, by his children among others, with grace and tenderness.

A longer review of Blitz ran last month. Both films are in cinemas.