By and large, the sex worker as a character has been consigned to the periphery on screen: hustling on the streets in fishnet stockings and mini skirts; seated on the lap of a gangster like an ornament; dead in a trunk or a back alley and autopsied in the morgue. Their nameless bodies are a dumping ground for misplaced anger and contempt. Their deaths are the inciting event for whodunit mysteries and redemptive journeys. Their lives, their dreams, their hopes are invisible and invariably beside the point. Sex work has historically been pathologised in cinema as it has been in society at large. Too often, it is conflated with trafficking and exploitation. If sex workers aren’t cast as pitiable victims, they are flattened into archetypes: the glamorous, the fallen, the golden-hearted waiting to be rescued and reformed by a moneyed saviour. A scene from Anora (Prime Video) Anora presents a corrective to movies like Pretty Woman by exposing the Hollywood fantasy to be far removed from the socio-economic realities. Sean Baker’s latest casts Mikey Madison’s …