| Netflix | Release Date: November 1, 2024 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
35
Mixed:
14
Negative:
6
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Critic Reviews
Oct 28, 2024
An audacious and absurdly entertaining genre-hopping musical thriller set in Mexico, Emilia Pérez tells the tale of a drug cartel boss who enlists the talents of a junior lawyer, played by a Zoë Saldaña, to help him undergo gender-affirming surgery, then entangles her in his quest for redemption.
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The TimesOct 28, 2024
The songs are often exquisite, the duets heartbreaking. The performances are trophy bait, Saldaña’s especially. And the go-for-broke direction belies the notion that a septuagenarian like Audiard should be making movies of autumnal wisdom. This is a vivid, high-energy film, one of the year’s best.
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Nov 13, 2024
Now that those rights are even more imperiled than before, a movie like Emilia Pérez—one that, instead of pleading for trans acceptance merely treats it as a given—feels even more like movie fireworks, fierce and glorious, a radical act of the imagination with kindness in its heart.
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Nov 13, 2024
Though Emilia Pérez is not a movie intended only for female audiences, it’s one that reflects deeply on the embodied experience of being a woman, a condition that some characters endure as a form of imprisonment—one unhappily kept wife sings of her life in the proverbial “golden cage”—while others look to womanhood as a potential site for personal and societal reinvention.
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May 19, 2024
Emilia Pérez charms, partly, because of its imperfections, its bold choices that don’t always neatly land. The film walks a fine line between daring and ridiculous, and unlike some other big-swing movies at this year’s Cannes, Emilia Pérez stays mostly on the side of good. Its heart is in the right place, as its style.
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Sep 4, 2024
Nov 13, 2024
From the start, the movie hooks you because of its abrupt turns, how it veers into places that, tonally, narratively and emotionally, you don’t expect. Yet while Audiard has productively combined classic genres and present-day sensibilities before, even the more personal, confessional numbers here add little more than novelty.
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May 19, 2024
Whenever it finally opens, we’ll probably all be too busy trying to cancel each other over this or that, in part because, despite the fact that he makes grandiose, overstuffed films, Audiard rarely holds our hand when it comes to telling us how to feel about his characters; he has a maximalist’s eye and a minimalist’s heart, which is a fascinating tension to bring into a musical.
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The Daily BeastMay 19, 2024
Emilia Perez wins you over by being unabashedly sincere. It takes its mission in all of its various genres—musical, crime thriller, and soap opera—seriously thanks to the committed performances and Audiard’s expressive direction. Nothing is treated as a gag despite the inherent zaniness of the performances. Ultimately, it’s really earnest, above all else.
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Oct 7, 2024
The promise of more music keeps the movie on life support when its drama threatens to flatline. When these sequences gradually recede from the movie, it feels as if someone should call an ambulance, but it’s also too late. What’s left are shadows of what might have been Saldaña and Gomez’s best on-screen performances, or Gascón’s breakthrough.
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Feb 5, 2025
Directed by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, The Sisters Brothers), whose heart might be in the right place—the movie at least honors Emilia’s dysmorphia, rather than using it as a plot gimmick—but whose execution resembles something like community-theater Sicario, pulsed in an erratic blender.
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Oct 7, 2024
If a musical is supposed to communicate things that can’t be conveyed through normal dialogue, Emilia Pérez’s biggest problem is that it falls prey to redundancy, regurgitating the same ideas about identity, desire, violence, and redemption, betraying how little it has to say in the first place.
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Jan 22, 2025
The acting is sub-par, with Selena Gomez delivering the weakest performance. I don’t know Spanish, but even I can tell she struggles to sound like it’s her first language. As Emilia, Karla Sofía Gascón is stiff as a board and can’t sing. Zoe Saldaña is the only one putting an effort in, but even she can’t make horrible lyrics sound authentic.
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