177. Best Picture Showcase '25: EMILIA PEREZ dir. Jacques Audiard

EMILIA PEREZ, Jacques Audiard's audacious trilingual crime musical, is our next stop on the Best Picture Showcase! The most critically divisive of the nominees tells the story of a Mexican drug kingpin (Karla Sofia Gascon) who enlists a junior lawyer (Zoe Saldana) to help her transition into living life as a woman via securing gender-affirming surgery, faking her death, moving her wife (Selena Gomez) and kids to Switzerland. It's...a lot.And it's weirdly not a spoiler to say this is only the first 40 or so minutes of the movie? This plan goes off without too many hitches. It's what follows when the kingpin, living now as the titular character, decides she can no longer live without her kids and needs them back in Mexico that leads to the film's culminating chaos.This is a movie of bold choices, wild lighting and camera operation, larger-than-life performances that play like a neon-soaked Mexican telenovela. It doesn't always work, sometimes to derisive hilarity, but sue me, it makes me smile.---Follow The Movies on Instagram & LetterboxdThrow a couple dollars in the tip jar!