Emilia Pérez (2024)

13 Oscar nominations including Best Picture.

Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer with career frustrations, has a fantastically cinematic way of expressing herself: a minute into Jacques Audiard’s film, she explodes eloquently into song. When the entire courtroom starts singing and dancing with her, you know you’re watching something entirely new. Audiard, who wrote the screenplay, initially imagined Emilia Pérez as an opera and everything about it is oversized in the most vital way imaginable. As the film begins, Manitas del Monte is a terrifying drug cartel honcho who offers Rita a fortune if she’ll find the surgeon who’ll help him with a delicate procedure. Jessi (Selena Gomez )is Manitas’ abandoned young wife. Saldaña and Gomez shared the best actress award at Cannes. (dir. Jacques Audiard, France, 2024, 132m)

“Audiard’s trick is to make the overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers. It’s hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does.” –The Telegraph