Emilia Pérez

The latest from French director Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Rust and Bone) is a tonally erratic mash-up of a crime thriller about the leader of a Mexican drug cartel who changes sex to disappear from enemies (and to affirm the gender she feels born to), a family drama about a transgender parent trying to maintain a connection with children and atone for past sins, and a lavish contemporary musical (the kind with no memorable songs that attempts to offset the backed-in artificiality of the genre by shooting in a gritty, handheld, pseudo-documentary style even though everything looks like it's been shot on sets or in front of greenscreens). While the premise proposes many interesting narrative threads and thematic ideas, these are crushed under the weight of a director and cast trying too hard to be too many things at once.