Pick of the week
Emilia Pérez
Jacques Audiard’s audacious musical drama flips between crime thriller and telenovela to tell an emotional story of identity, family and how the past weighs on the present. Zoe Saldaña is a revelation, singing and dancing con brio as lawyer Rita – hired by Mexican cartel boss Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón, touching in a double role) to arrange his gender reassignment and secret new life as a woman, Emilia. Selena Gomez plays Manitas’s unwitting wife, then supposed widow, Jessi, nonplussed by “cousin” Emilia’s interest in her and her children’s lives. A sweeping melodrama of reinvention and redemption that ploughs through its absurdities with showtunes and tears.
Wednesday 13 November, Netflix
