[NOTE: The well-reviewed and highly anticipated new movie from Sean Baker, Anora, opens this week at Cinema 21, the Hollywood Theatre, and the Living Room Theaters. A review in this space will be forthcoming next week.]

Emilia Pérez, the new film from French director Jacques Audiard and an Oscar front-runner for (at the least) Best International Film, doesn’t so much shatter boundaries as simply ignore them. Taking place in Mexico City, Bangkok, Switzerland, Israel, London, and Paris, it crosses national borders with the ease of moving from one set on a sound stage to another. Swirling together melodrama, campy humor crime saga, and song-and-dance, it treats genre boundaries as ephemeral at best. And it centers on characters who, in search of their best selves, dare to discard the legal, moral, and physical categories that hem them in.

The three women at the center of this operatic fable are the title character (Karla Sofía Gascón), a Mexican drug cartel kingpin who decides to fake her own death and obtain gender confirmation surgery; Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), the successful but frustrated attorney Emilia hires to oversee this process; and Jessi (Selena Gomez), the wife who’s left behind. Powered by these three leads, and Audiard’s audacious approach, Emilia Pérez is that rarest of things: a true novelty.

After helping to get a wealthy, guilty client acquitted for murder, Rita receives a mysterious offer promising a big payoff. Curious, she soon finds herself kidnapped and confronted with Manitas Del Monte (Gascón, under heavy makeup), a macho-presenting crime lord who has been secretly taking hormone therapy for two years. She takes the gig and travels the world looking for a skilled, discreet surgeon, which leads to a Busby Berkeley-style number in a Thai clinic that features a song called “Vaginoplasty.” She also secures a new life for the ostensibly widowed Jessi and the couple’s children in Switzerland, to avoid retribution from Manitas’s rivals following his disappearance.

Cut to four years later, when Rita meets Emilia Pérez at a dinner party and, once she recognizes her, worries that the former Manitas has come to tie up loose ends, so to speak. In fact, Emilia has decided that she misses her family terribly and wants Rita’s help bringing them back to Mexico, where Emilia will pose as Manitas’s long-lost cousin and take them in. There’s some maudlin goofiness as this happens that skirts perilously close to Mrs. Doubtfire territory, but Audiard and his cast mostly weave deftly between genuine emotion and heightened reality.

Having a body that matches her gender seems to have transformed Emilia from a ruthless gangster to a socially conscious activist intent on helping to recover and identify the bodies of drug-war victims. But when Jessi meets a new man and embarks on a new life, it turns out that some old habits die hard.

Gascón, a Mexican telenovela star who transitioned in middle-age, is a revelation, bringing warmth and depth to a potentially one-note character, and Gomez gives the best dramatic performance of her career. But Saldaña, who has enlivened sci-fi franchises from Star Trek to Star Wars to Avatar, is the biggest surprise, showing off her dance moves and nailing the movie’s unique vibe. Her big number, set during a donor’s banquet for Emilia’s nonprofit organization, is a definite high point. But quieter musical moments, including one in which one of Emilia’s children softly sings about memories of their father’s smell, have impact as well. All three actors, joined by Adriana Paz in a smaller role, shared the Best Actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where the movie also took home the Jury Prize.

It makes sense that Audiard would successfully steer this free-range effort, nimbly shifting moods, styles, and tropes. For decades, he’s been something of an auteurist chameleon, although he made his early mark with crime-centered films including the Oscar-nominated prison drama A Prophet and the noir-inflected The Beaat My Heart Skipped. More recently, he helmed the acclaimed romance Rust and Bone, in which Marion Cotillard plays a woman who loses her legs while training killer whales; the offbeat, English-language Western The Sisters Brothers, starring John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix; and the young-Parisians-in-love ensemble piece Paris, 13th District, based on graphic novels by American Adrian Tomine. With Emilia Pérez, he has returned to a focus on demimondes and outsiders, but with a freewheeling, post-modernist perspective. Because this is a Netflix release, opportunities to see it in a theater will be few and fleeting, but it’s well worth making the trip. (Salem Cinema, Living Room Theaters; begins streaming on Netflix Nov. 13)

ALSO OPENING

Chasing Chasing Amy: The cinema of Kevin Smith, in some ways, has not aged well. The erstwhile rags-to-riches indie darling behind Clerks, Mallrats, and the rest of the “Askewniverse” can sometimes seem a relic of those halcyon 1990s days. (It doesn’t help that when he has stepped off the Jersey stoner treadmill, the results have generally been forgettable.) But in Sav Rogers’s surprisingly affecting first-person documentary about one individual’s literally life-saving relationship to Smith’s 1997 movie Chasing Amy, he comes across as a smart, sympathetic figure who seems almost to want to atone for his youthful folly.

In Chasing Amy, Ben Affleck plays Holden, one-half of a comic book-making duo (the other being Jason Lee), who falls hard for a fellow creator, Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), who happens to be a lesbian. Despite this, Holden convinces Alyssa to “switch teams,” as we used to say, and embark on a passionate romance. This has, as you might imagine, made Chasing Amy problematic for many members of the LGTBQIA+ community. For Rodgers, growing up queer in Kansas, however, it was a crucial part of coming out. Decades later, he travels to Red Bank, New Jersey, the center of the Askewniverse, to pay tribute and explore the duality of the representational thing.

Both Smith and Adams sit for extended interviews, separately and together. (They were a couple at the time of filming, and their relationship inspired some of the movie’s themes, as did producer Scott Mosier’s friendship with lesbian filmmaker Guinevere Turner [Go Fish], both of whom Rodgers also speaks with.) During the making of the film, Rodgers begins taking testosterone as part of his transition journey. While it functions best as a reflection on one film’s legacy, Chasing Chasing Amy has larger things to say about both the gender disparities in independent cinema and the ways that art so often escapes and transcends the intentions of the artist. (Kiggins Theater, which is also screening Chasing Amy for those who need a refresher.)

Music documentaries: Barely a week goes by without some cinematic celebration of sound waltzing through town, but this week is a veritable boxed set of tributes to sonic heroes. On Friday night, PAM CUT welcomes iconic singer-songwriter and DIY legend Ani DiFranco to the Tomorrow Theater for a screening of 1-800-On-Her-Own, the new documentary profile directed by Dana Flor (who will also be in attendance). The film intersperses candid, often quite vulnerable, footage of DiFranco on the road in pandemic-era America and archival material chronicling her emergence in the 1990s as a queer, anti-capitalist folk paragon. Overall, it’s a pretty typical retrospective tribute, with the spikiest moments coming during an ill-fated, lockdown-era collaboration with Bon Iver’s producer. (Friday, Nov. 1, Tomorrow Theater)

Archival material forms the heart of Omar & Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, a montage of moments from the mercurial lives and careers of Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, the duo behind the ’90s hardcore band At the Drive-In and the more recent, prog-influenced The Mars Volta. Crafted from the endless amount of camcorder footage shot by Omar over the decades, and covering tumultuous events ranging from the drug-related deaths of beloved bandmates to Cedric’s time as a member of the Church of Scientology, it’s an overstuffed and overlong onslaught, which feels oddly appropriate for a couple of dudes who refused to ever censor themselves. Play It Loud. (Friday & Saturday, Nov. 1 & 2, Hollywood Theatre)

If those two films aren’t enough to sate your desire for admiring portraits of anti-corporate, gender-bending acts from the ’80s & ’90s, there’s more! Placebo: This Search for Meaning profiles the British rock band Placebo, which gained notoriety for its androgynous image and subject matter, and screens at the Hollywood on Sunday, Nov. 3. Last but certainly not least, on the same evening the Tomorrow Theater will screen We Are Fugazi from Washington, D.C., which assembles a curated selection of fan-shot material from the legendary punk rockers into a combination tribute and archive.

Dinner in America: He’s the destructive, rude lead singer for a scrappy rock band who’s on the run from the law. She’s the long-suffering introverted daughter in a gratingly dysfunctional family. When he convinces her parents that he’s a Christian missionary in need of a place to stay, they let him into their home. Will this manic punky dream guy manage to get her out of her miserable shell? Director Adam Rehmeier’s 2020 feature shoots for a dyspeptic, Solondzian humor, but only occasionally hits the mark. (Cinemagic, 11/2, 11/3, 11/6, 11/7)

The Muleteer (La Arriera): Presented by the Portland Latin American Film Festival, this lyrical historical saga follows a young woman who disguises herself as a man in order to work as a muleteer (mule driver) in 1930s Mexico. Sixteen-year-old Maria (Sasha González) was adopted by a ranching family as a baby, and as she comes of age she develops an intimate relationship with her cousin Inés (Mayra Batalla), one which her other cousin Martín (Luis Vegas) disapproves of. In search of her birth father, she embarks on an arduous journey through the wilderness, one that recalls the 1994 American indie The Ballad of Little Jo. Splendidly photographed and languidly paced, with no more dialogue than needed, writer-director Isabel Cristina Fregoso’s narrative feature debut shows restraint and an accomplished visual sense. (Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 7:30 p.m.)

Let’s Start a Cult: Stand-up comic Stavros Halkias makes the jump to the big screen in this middling effort about an annoying, overweight buffoon who so alienates the members of the cult he’s a member of that they excluded him from the suicide ritual intended to transport them to another plane. Our hero returns home with a fake explanation for his recent absence and sets about annoying his family as well. When he discovers that the cult’s leader somehow survived, he decides to collect a group of dimwitted followers of his own. With the proliferation of cult exposés on streaming services these days, the time is ripe for a sharp satire about the tropes and stereotypes involved. This ain’t it. (Living Room Theaters, Movies on TV)

Here: Robert Zemeckis reunites with Forrest Gump stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for this typically gimmicky story about one couple’s decades together, seen from a single fixed perspective in their living room. (various locations)

Godzilla Minus One: The winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Visual Effects returns to theaters to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the big guy. (various locations)

Leap of Faith: A dozen Christian pastors from diverse backgrounds and with diverse political and religious approaches gather for a retreat to see if they can overcome their differences. (Regal Fox Tower)

Hitpig: Berkeley Breathed’s children’s book Pickles & Pete was the inspiration for this animated feature about a porcine bounty hunter hired to retrieve an errant elephant. (various locations)

Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3: The third installment in the Hindi-language supernatural comedy series centers on the efforts of a fake medium to help a young woman rid her ancestral home of malevolent spirits. (Clackamas Town Center, Cedar Hills, Movies on TV)

The Carpenter: A muscly dude in ancient Nazareth, down on his luck, gets a gig helping out a local woodworker, who turns out to be (spoiler alert!) the Messiah. Faith-based cinema at its finest. I mean, you gotta watch that trailer. (Clackamas Town Center, Sandy Cinema, Battle Ground Cinema)

Lost on a Mountain in Maine: The true story of a 12-year-old boy who survived nine days alone in the wilderness comes to the screen after being the topic of a best-selling book. Produced by Sylvester Stallone. (Movies on TV)

Absolution: Liam Neeson and Ron Perlman collect checks in this very familiar-looking story about an aging criminal who gets one last shot at…redemption? Forgiveness? Atonement? Something like that. (Movies on TV)

ALSO SHOWING

FRIDAY

• Being John Malkovich [1999] (Academy Theatre, through Thursday 11/7)

SATURDAY

• The Big Heat [1953] (Hollywood Theatre, 2:30 p.m.; also Sunday 11/2, 2:30 p.m.)
• Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (Tomorrow Theater, 4:00 p.m.)
• Fire [1996] (Tomorrow Theater, 7:00 p.m.)
• The Third Man [1949] (Cinema 21, 11:00 a.m.)

SUNDAY

• Coco [2017] (Tomorrow Theater, 4 p.m.)
• John Wick: It’s the 10th anniversary of the Keanu Reeves shoot ’em up. That’s like the 70th anniversary in dog years. [2014] (various locations and times, also Wednesday 11/6)
• Metropolis [2001] (Clackamas Town Center, Cedar Hills, 3:30 p.m.; also Monday 11/4 and Wednesday 11/6, 7:30 p.m.)

MONDAY

• Joe [1970] (Hollywood Theatre, 7:30 p.m., 35mm)

TUESDAY

• Jeff Koons: A Private Portrait (Salem Cinema, 6:00 p.m.)
• Silent Assassins [1988] (Hollywood Theatre, 7:30 p.m.)

THURSDAY

• Outside the Frame presents Reel Ambitions: An annual program presenting a selection of films made by youths who have experienced homelessness.