Sean Baker won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with this enthralling drama, featuring a star-making performance from Mikey Madison.

Baker (Florida Project, Red Rocket) presents a modern-day Cinderella story about Ani, a young sex worker from Brooklyn, meeting Vanya, a spoiled son of a Russian oligarch, who offers her a glamorous new life of possibility and incredible wealth. Ani’s wild ride and fairytale is soon threatened when news of their whirlwind marriage gets back to Russia, resulting in Vanya’s parents flying to New York to manage the situation. Both wildly entertaining and heartbreaking, Anora takes audiences on a freewheeling, rambunctious adventure that escalates to dizzying levels. Drawing comparisons to Pretty Woman, it constantly plays with genre and audience expectations. But what shines through most, as it does in all of his films, is Baker’s love for and unwillingness to judge his characters.

Anora has received six Oscar nominations and seven BAFTA nominations

Desperate to secure her fading celebrity status, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), undergoes a black-market medical procedure that promises self-actualization, but culminates in the spawning of Sue (Margaret Qualley), a bold and brash clone of her younger self that perpetuates its existence via weekly spinal taps. The pair are warned to respect their new symbiotic relationship or risk corrosive consequences. But as Sue starts reserving more time in the limelight at the behest of a slimeball executive (Dennis Quaid) and her own growing ambition, Sparkle is soon faced with an existential threat, one that engenders a wicked feud with her tulpa and a knock-down, drag-out battle to reclaim her autonomy.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening director RaMell Ross vividly brings Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winner to life with this masterclass in adaptation.

1960s, Tallahassee. Elwood Curtis is sent to the reformatory Nickel Academy for a crime he didn’t commit. Present day, New York. A revelation about the abuses suffered by the Academy’s students leads Curtis to remember his life-changing friendship with Jack Turner. Ross’s film is a dazzling achievement – a bold and beguiling exploration of trauma and buried American history.

The film has received 2 Oscar nominations and 1 BAFTA nomination