The Best Films to See This November

From Sean Baker’s exuberant sex-worker comedy Anora to a papal twist on Succession, here are five of the best films to watch this month

Anora

From November 1

In the broad-brush outlines of its story, Anora sounds a lot like Pretty Woman in reverse, a social-realist rebuke to the fairytale trope of a rich man riding to the rescue of a kind-hearted hooker. It’s an echo Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or-winning new film leans deliberately into, but in truth Anora is more of a romp than a finger-wagging exercise, Safdie Bros-esque in its fraught comic staging and wrapped up in a swirl of nighttime colour by cinematographer Drew Daniels (Red Rocket, Waves).

Ani/Anora (Mikey Madison) is a stripper in New York’s Brighton Beach neighbourhood who begins hooking up with Vanya (a charismatic turn from Mark Eidelstein), the hard-partying son of a Russian oligarch. After taking off to Vegas for a week of debauchery they decide to get wed, news that is decidedly not music to the ears of Vanya’s father, who sends for his goons to get the marriage annulled. When they succeed in tracking the pair down, Vanya makes a run for it, and Ani is dragged kicking and screaming into a chase across the city for her runaway groom.

Sex work is a central theme of Baker’s; it’s a world he knows how to convincingly portray, with Madison fearless in ways Julia Roberts was never asked to be as a woman trying to figure out what love looks like in a transactional world. Reading that sentence back you begin to wonder if Baker is indulging a few fantasies of his own here, a thought that recurs in the bad-guy mugging that dominates the film’s second half. Likewise the character of Igor, a hired muscle enforcer who watches Ani with growing admiration even as he keeps her against her will: it’s a lovely, watchful performance from Yura Borisov, but a leap all the same to believe that a kidnapping could become something akin to a meet-cute.

Whatever: Baker’s film offers a breathlessly good time even as it chucks cold water on the idea of love between its two leads. It’s beautifully performed and seductively paced – and, in its own way, just as much a fantasy as the sex-worker cliches it seeks to discredit.

Read our guide to the films of Sean Baker here. 

Conclave

From November 1

Edward Berger swept home to Oscars glory last year with his WWI epic All Quiet on the Western Front, and there’s every chance he might bag a couple more with Conclave, an adaptation of Robert Harris’s Vatican potboiler that’s part conspiracy thriller, part deranged workplace comedy.

When the Pope pops his clogs from a heart attack, right-hand man Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) fires the starting gun on the race to find his successor, only to discover unseemly secrets about his colleagues as they jostle for position. A papist Succession, then? Kind of, with pretenders to the throne including Cardinals Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a vape-smoking bigot borrowing from the Giorgia Meloni playbook of divide and rule, Tremblay (John Lithgow), who looks suss from the get-go, and Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a basically chill guy with an ironic smile and views that one might suppose align closely with those of the actor Stanley Tucci.

But what of Lawrence’s own designs on the hot seat, which he claims not to want on account of his own wavering faith? Cue much holy hand-wringing and A+ acting work from Ralph Fiennes’ forehead, as hustings are beset by mounting political scandals, car bombs, nuns with secrets and much more besides. Your eyes will roll a full 360º at the twist ending, which is at once in dubious taste and in complete keeping with this liberal fever dream of a movie. But it’s addictive all the same, Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) pulling the strings with fiendish precision and a keen eye for the unrivalled camp of Catholic pageantry. Seek it out, and ye shall find.

All We Imagine As Light

From November 29

Payal Kapadia’s second feature was the best-reviewed film to come out of Cannes this year, a transfixing study on the bonds of sisterhood amid the tumult of modern-day Mumbai. Telling the stories of three nurses whose lives are defined and delimited by the men in – and out – of their lives, the film moves from beautiful, gloaming-hour scenes of the city at night to a beach resort on the Arabian sea, where the women take off on a trip suffused with moments of mystical longing. It’s a film that’s hard to define, and even harder to forget.

Bird

From November 8

Andrea Arnold’s first fiction feature in almost a decade might just rank as her first artistic failure, though the vibrancy of her filmmaking remains undimmed. Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is a headstrong tween given free run of the neighbourhood by her dad, the endearing but useless Bug (Barry Keoghan, having a ball). Her dreams of escape are made flesh when she encounters a man, Bird (Franz Rogowski), with a secret that lifts the film into the realms of fantasy: and that’s where the trouble begins for Bird, unfortunately. The project is clearly a personal one for Arnold, who maps her own love of nature and film onto Bailey, and her visual mastery of the environment her characters inhabit is absolute. But she’s on shakier ground with the story’s more fanciful elements, which feel sadly undercooked and rob the finale of its necessary punch.

Read Another Man’s profile of Franz Rogowski here.

Layla

From November 22

Sweet-natured drag queen Layla (Bilal Hasna) lives for the ball until they meet Max (Louis Greatorex), a normie working for a London ad agency who seems to return their gaze with interest. “I can go as big as I like around him,” swoons Layla of their new fancy man, but their friends are rightly suspicious: an interloper in this world, Max sees Layla as “an adventure” and panics when they show up to his work dressed in colourful attire. Debutante Amrou Al-Kadhi has a first-timer’s tendency to trowel on the subtext when a little would go a long way, but their film offers a compelling dive into the frictional relationship between gay and queer subcultures, and is winningly performed by Hasna, who brings warmth and rich interiority to the role.