Join us at West Newton Cinema for a special screening of Sean Baker’s critically acclaimed film “Anora” followed by a panel discussion featuring Lisa Goldblatt Grace, Malcolm Turvey, and Ty Burr.

Anora* is a comedy-drama about a New York exotic dancer (Mikey Madison) whose involvement with the son of a Russian oligarch (Paul Weissman) leads to a farcical odyssey across Brooklyn and a hard reckoning. The film won the top prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and is already being hailed as one of the year’s best movies—but is its portrait of sex work empathetic or exploitive, a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the realities or just another Hollywood fairy tale?

Panelists will include Lisa Goldblatt Grace, Co-Executive Director of My Life My Choice, a national organization fighting the commercial sexual exploitation of women and children, and Professor Malcolm Turvey, founding Director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program and a distinguished scholar of film theory and aesthetics. The event will be moderated by Ty Burr, the Boston Globe’s film critic from 2002 to 2021 and currently reviewing movies for The Washington Post and in the subscription newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List.

*Content Note: Anora is an R-rated film, with rough language and scenes of nudity and graphic sexuality.