Review Roundup: EMILIA PEREZ Musical Starring Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana

Emilia Perez is now streaming on Netflix and critics are weighing in on the musical fever dream which stars Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, and Selena Gomez. 

Through liberating song and dance and bold visuals, this odyssey follows the journey of four remarkable women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness. The fearsome cartel leader Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) enlists Rita (Zoe Saldaña), an unappreciated lawyer stuck in a dead-end job, to help fake her death so that Emilia can finally live authentically as her true self.

Written and directed by Jacques Audiard, the film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, receiving five nominations and winning three awards, including Best Actress and Best Soundtrack. The movie was released on Netflix on November 13 in the US, Canada, and the UK following a theatrical release in select theaters on November 1. Find out what critics think below!

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Wendy Ide, The Guardian: "The film’s messaging on female empowerment and living authentically might border on the trite. The means of delivering that message, however, does at least feel genuinely fresh and new."

Peter Dubruge, Variety: "Audiard’s dazzling and instantly divisive film — which stars Zoe Saldaña as the lawyer who helps Manitas transition and Selena Gomez as the mother of their two sons — doesn’t strictly adhere to the codes set by GLAAD and other LGBT advocates, and yet, “Emilia Pérez” emerges as a powerful, unfiltered portrait of someone who challenges several stereotypes at once."

Siddhant Adlakha, Mashable: "Above all else, the film's four leading ladies are perfectly attuned to Audiard's volatile mixture of operatic emotion and naturalistic cinematic influence. The result is a dazzling, dramatic high-wire act that's always fun to watch, and is frequently invigorating, too."

Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly: "Despite a slow start and its wildly varying tones, Emilia Pérez works best when you give yourself over to its harried, shaggy magic. It's an ambitious, provocative, big swing of a picture — and if it's not always a home run, at least it manages to consistently get on base."

Brian Truitt, USA Today: "The stellar acting and assorted songs boost much of the familiar elements in "Emilia Pérez,” creating something inventively original and never, ever bland."

Tom Gliatto, People: "It’s a wild, genre-bending ride, a musical that sizzles with outrageous passion and outrageous camp...One complaint: For a musical, the songs are too brief, too small, to convey much. Imagine if West Side Story were hummed."

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: "Some Francophile cinema fans keep hoping that Audiard will make another searing drama like A Prophet or Rust and Bone, but any filmmaker who declines to repeat himself and instead keeps experimenting and pushing in new directions should be applauded. With Emilia Pérez, he has made something fresh, full of vitality and affecting, held aloft by its own quietly soaring power."

Stephanie Bunbury, Deadline: "...how could Emilia Pérez be anything but a hot mess? But here is it is on the screen, a musical marvel. Of course it’s crazy, but Audiard has set up his impossible conjuring trick and made it work.

Stephanie Zacharek, Time: Audiard’s film is a challenge to find the beginning that comes after the end. It’s not about trans possibility, but about human possibility. Because they’re one and the same.

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: "Audiard has created an elaborate frame for Emilia, whose desire to become her true self is moving. Hers is at once a personal truth and a new kind of heroic quest, one that the offscreen world has grotesquely politicized. Audiard has created Emilia to startle and divert, but it’s Gascón’s performance that centers and grounds the story, and it’s the actress who finally gives the movie real stakes. She is its heart and soul both."

John Nugent, Empire: "It’s a shame, given this transformative turn and the rare leading-role screentime afforded to her, that Audiard’s script and perspective too often indulge in some of the laziest tropes of trans stories from cis writers. Characters misgender and deadname Emilia; Emilia herself suggests at one point she is “half a woman”; there is greater focus on her physical surgery over any internal journey. One song where a doctor merrily sings about penises and vaginas feels clunky and inconsiderate, too. And it all builds to a gun-toting overkill of a finale that undermines what came before it. Still, for better and for worse, you won’t see anything else like it this year."

Carlos Aguilar, RogerEbert.com: "For all its prickly aesthetic and thematic components, there's an enticing lusciousness to "Emilia Pérez" derived from that over-the-top saturation of hammered-in ideas in combination with dazzling and dizzying imagery. Like synthetic flavoring extracts, there's no real fruit in them, but the feelings they provoke, positive and negative alike, are true."

Peter Travers, GMA: "Audiard's brilliantly conceived and executed film moves from one highlight to another, erasing the line between singing, dancing and acting, fusing them into something that keeps the movie blazing. "Emilia Pérez" means to shake you and does it ever. This you don't want to miss."

Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire: "Audiard deserves credit for his adventurousness and, in both the pejorative and non-pejorative senses of the term, cinematic allyship. It’s unclear whether he ran the film’s particular language and expression of transness up the identity flagpole, and some audiences may either have a field day with Audiard’s approach or be entirely enchanted and feel seen by it."

Dana Stevens, Slate: "Though I found the movie utterly transporting, I can concede that there may be something in the treatment of the character by Audiard (a cis man) that partakes in the familiar archetype of the tragic trans woman, from Jared Leto’s Rayon in The Dallas Buyer’s Club to Eddie Redmayne’s Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl. But Gascón’s generosity and deftness as a performer allow her, in scene after scene, to push past such limits. Right up to the ending—which had me clapping a hand to my mouth in shock, then bursting into tears—she keeps finding newer and deeper ways to be Emilia Pérez, a character (and a movie) that’s all about the never-finished project of learning to become yourself."

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