It feels far too simplistic to describe Jacques Audiard’s audacious, genre-bending Emilia Pérez as “simply” a gender-affirming narco-thriller musical. It is definitely all of those things, but it also defies being put in any box, no matter how capacious. Emilia Pérez is a person. She is a trans woman who loves her children, who hates who she’s been, who wants love and sisterhood and to fix some of the pain she’s caused. Emilia Pérez is a movement, striving to repair some of the tens of thousands of broken hearts in her native Mexico, torn apart by cartels. And Emilia Pérez is an idea, a vision of who and what we could be if we could just meet each other where we are and set aside our prejudices. 

Emilia Pérez is anchored by two bombastic, fearless performances: Zoe Saldaña is simply revelatory as Rita, a lawyer whose career defending rich, violent criminals takes a dramatic, identity-consuming turn after an encounter with a druglord; and Karla Sofia Gascón is groundbreaking as Emilia, a wealthy trans woman creating a new identity after a life of regret. Together they form the emotional core of the film, a found family brought together by power and fear, and kept together by respect and, eventually, friendship. Selena Gomez appears as Jessi, the estranged wife of the cartel leader Rita meets early in the film, in a misguided performance that can only be described as hammy (though Gomez of course excels in the film’s many musical numbers). Adriana Paz rounds out the Cannes Best Actress-winning quartet in a small but impactful role as Epifanía, a woman whose husband has been missing for years. 

The musical numbers are many and kinetic, propelling forward our understanding of these characters’ emotional lives without grinding the story to a halt. If there is any justice in the film industry, this could mark the long-awaited, triumphant return of original movie-musicals (but that of course has been said many times over the years, to tragically little effect). Here is where Saldaña is most unexpected and dazzling, with a quiet but confident control of her many numbers. Gascón, too, brings a reflective tenderness that makes her songs more formative than any simple monologue could. 

Viewers will walk away from a text as rich as Emilia Pérez with a lot to chew on, but the most impactful conversation it engages in is around gender. In the first act this discourse around Emilia’s gender and transition honestly can feel misguided, triggering, and a bit troubling, but the second act quickly recovers to become beautifully empowering in what is by the film’s climax a loving queer opus.

Emilia Pérez: ★★★★½

Emilia Pérez will be released in U.S. theaters on November 1, in advance of its Netflix debut on November 13.

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In Rumours, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson stretch an excellent metaphor far past the point of usefulness. As nationalist archetypes of the G7 leaders (hosted by Cate Blanchett’s German chancellor and led by Charles Dance’s totally-not-supposed-to-be-Biden U.S. president) mentally masturbate over a provisional statement responding to a vague, undefined global crisis, Iron Age bog mummies come-to-life literally masturbate until they explode as a signifier of how the end of the world is happening quietly around us while global leaders fritter away our collective time and resources. A more than solid feature film cast is wasted on a short film’s worth of content and a trailer’s worth of funny lines.

Bonus points for excellent, G7-appropriate needle drops, particularly the use of the first and last movements of Ottorino Respighi’s Pini di Roma to bookend the film.

Rumours: ★★

Rumours will be released in U.S. theaters by Bleecker Street Media on October 11.

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A quiet love story between two coal miners, the titular Viet and Nam, Truong Minh Quy’s film functions on another plane as a love story between two halves of a country still grappling decades later with the aftermath of their period of separation. We join Viet and Nam in their brief stolen moments of pleasure, hidden in the depths of the mine, dust-covered skin punctuated by vibrantly, salaciously pink lips and tongues; we follow along as they venture to the Cambodian border, meeting psychics and dodging unexplored ordnance while trying to find the tree from Viet’s mother’s dreams where she’s convinced his father’s remains lie; and we observe Viet preparing to be trafficked via cargo container to pursue a better life, Nam waiting stoically like a wife hoping for her husband to return from war. 

It all adds up to a bleak outlook on Vietnam’s past, present, and future, another generation separated from home, stability, and love because of the continuing ramifications of their parents’ and grandparents’ version of the same. They seek a second chance from the very world powers that rent their country asunder and left its remaining populace to repair it when they couldn’t even put themselves or their families back together. Viet and Nam presents a challenging, beautiful, heartbreaking portrait of hopeless loves.

Viet and Nam: ★★★½

Viet and Nam will be released by Strand Releasing in early 2025.

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Payal Kapadia’s lovely fiction feature debut All We Imagine as Light – the first Indian film to screen in Competition at Cannes in three decades – follows two nurses in Mumbai, new roommates Prabha and Anu, as they grapple with the tension between the freedoms that living in Mumbai offers them and the continued challenges and expectations faced by women in a deeply conservative culture. Prabha tries to process the crumbling of her long-distance marriage with an unseen husband who has stopped so much as calling from his job in Germany, while also trying to help her friend Parvaty to save her home from predatory property developers (without a husband, Parvaty has no way to prove ownership). Anu is desperate to avoid an arranged marriage and struggling with her feelings for her boyfriend and everything that his Muslim identity means for her. 

Kapadia’s direction is confident, painting a portrait of Mumbai and modern India as much as it does Prabha and Anu. Where the film lacks is in exploring the interiority of these characters. A lot of time is spent looking at the women’s faces or seeing Mumbai through their eyes, but they aren’t giving anything away; instead we’re left wondering what secrets are hiding in the quiet, what Anu and especially Prabha aren’t telling us or even themselves.

All We Imagine as Light: ★★★½

All We Imagine as Light will be released by Janus Film and Sideshow on November 15.

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Naomi Watts turns in some of her most interesting and emotive work in what feels like ages opposite the absolute scene-stealer that is her co-star, a 150 pound Great Dane named Bing, in The Friend, from longtime directing partners David Siegel and Scott McGehee and based on the book by Sigrid Nunez. What feels at first like the setup for a particularly hokey Lifetime movie – white lady who procrastinates too much is sad because her wealthy friend killed himself and left her his huge dog that she can’t have in her rent-controlled Manhattan apartment – ends up being a tender meditation on how those left behind by suicide feel, what it means to love something outside yourself, and the narrow, blurry line between friendship and something more. 

If The Friend has much to say about the nature of friendship and the importance of making sure the people in your life know that they matter to you, it has just as much not to say about Watts’s character Iris’s more…shall we say, Karen? tendencies. Pretty much every conflict Iris runs into is tied to her needing to put a BIPOC service worker in their place. This woman is the very definition of privilege, and she spends the entire movie figuring out how she can get more. Where The Friend is at its best is when it steps into a more introspective mode, exploring Iris’s relationships with her friend Walter, his daughter and ex-wives, his dog, and herself. The supporting cast in particular, featuring Sarah Pidgeon as Walter’s daughter; Constance Wu, Carla Gugino, and Noma Dumezweni as his ex-wives; and Ann Dowd as her concerned neighbor, are all given something to chew on in what could easily become unforgiving bit parts in less capable hands. 

The Friend: ★★★

At time of writing, The Friend does not have U.S. distribution.

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Years-old simmering tensions come to the fore and tear apart a tight-knit French village after the death of a beloved patriarch in Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia. When Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns home for the funeral, he’s met with suspicion and aggression from his childhood friend Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) and knowing, open arms from Vincent’s mother Martine (Catherine Frot). As a moment of passion causes what begins as a character study to start to veer into noir territory, Guiraudie guides us through the twisting, claustrophobic geography of the Massif Central, where even in the vast expanse of the forest there’s somehow always someone just behind the next tree, watching. Misericordia keeps you on your toes, always wondering what Jérémie will face next, who knows what, and what secrets this village is keeping, with a discomfiting and persistent sense of humor. Come for the anxiety release, stay for the biggest boner jump-scare in years.

Misericordia: ★★★★½

Misericordia will be released by Janus Films at Sideshow, date TBD.

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Amy Adams turns in a fantastically free-wheeling and unhinged performance as a struggling mother who is convinced she’s turning into a dog in Nightbitch, the latest achievement from Marielle Heller, one of our foremost directors of actors. In tapping into her primal instincts and having what looks like the time of her life, Adams is able to unearth profound truth about the parental experience and how easy it is to let children and societal expectations completely subsume your identity, to the point that you stop being a real person and become only Mother (or Husband, or Baby). 

Heller turns in a lean, fast-paced film, leveraging skillful editing to present Mother’s dreadfully routine life without needing to spend valuable time dwelling in the drudgery. As the animal within starts to come out more and more – a process exacerbated by the frustratingly paltry breathing room Mother gets any time Husband (a tone-deaf and selfish Scoot McNairy) returns from his latest business trip – it becomes clear just how much that maternal routine represents a heavily gendered, perennially sexist trap.

Nightbitch: ★★★★

Nightbitch will be released by Searchlight Pictures on December 6.

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Lou Ye’s latest, An Unfinished Film, starts off with a fictionalized version of Lou (played by Mao Xiaorui) gathering the cast, crew, and footage to complete a sequel to his debut feature Spring Fever that has been left unfinished since 2009. It quickly transforms into a vital document of China’s devastating COVID lockdowns in early 2020. Shifting back and forth between documentary and drama, An Unfinished Film follows the assembled crew as they’re quarantined in their hotel over the Lunar New Year holiday, one after another falling ill. Qin Hao, who burst onto the Chinese film scene with his first leading role in Spring Fever, reprises a version of that film’s Jiang Cheng, as the film’s lead actor stuck in quarantine while his wife struggles at home with their newborn.

In its implicit criticism of the authoritarian way that the Chinese government handled lockdowns – as well as the rampant censorship of Chinese films – and the heartbreak of watching both the crew and people on social media lose precious moments with their loved ones, An Unfinished Film becomes a powerful if at times aimless feature. The lack of any clear narrative – and in fact Lou’s own explicit statements around how many times his own goals shifted throughout the production – leave it feeling a bit, well…unfinished.

An Unfinished Film: ★★★½

An Unfinished Film will be released by Film Movement in 2025.

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Wunderkind Hiroshi Okuyama’s second feature, My Sunshine – inspired and named after the Humbert Humbert song – is a sweet, sensitive, melancholic little gem of a coming of age film. Takuya (Koshiyama Keitatsu), a daydreaming boy with a bad stutter, wants to be doing anything other than play baseball or hockey, when he catches a glimpse of the graceful Sakura (Takanashi Kiara) being coached by former figure skating star Arakawa (Ikematsu Sôsuke), a gay man who recently moved to their isolated northern island to try to make ends meet with his boyfriend, Igarashi (Wakaba Ryûya). Soon Takuya is stumbling all over the ice trying spins of his own, and when Arakawa decides to take Takuya under his wing and pair him with Sakura as an ice dancing duo, a new realm of elegance and confidence opens up to him. 

Okuyama’s filmmaking prowess is on full display here – he wrote, directed, filmed, and edited My Sunshine – and the result is a lovely little snow globe. Okuyama chooses to leave many of the characters’ motivations and reactions – particularly Sakura’s, as her character evolves from ambitious to sweet to vile but also forgivably immature – ambiguous, which works up to a point but ultimately detracts from the tight movie he’s crafted. Even with that muddled characterization, though, My Sunshine is a welcome respite from the overwhelming darkness of many modern slices of life. 

My Sunshine: ★★★★

At time of writing, My Sunshine does not have U.S. distribution. 

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I’ll be back tomorrow to wrap up my coverage of the 49th Toronto International Film Festival. In the meantime, I’ll see you below!

You can find more of my reviews (and musings on the Oscars) here on The Avocado, and on Letterboxd.