Film critics are misunderstood; we love the movies more than anyone and wait each year for a handful of them to fall into our laps and remind us why we sit through the other 175 to 200 films a year. Emilia Pérez is one of those films.

Directed by Jacques Audiard, and based on Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name, this is a French production, set in Mexico City, and mostly, but not completely, in Spanish. It’s a drama, a kind of musical, and features a transgender woman as the title character.

Zoey Saldana is a competent but marginalized attorney who gets a mysterious call one night after she successfully gets a probable murderer off the hook. On the anonymous call is a man offering big bucks if she will meet him and hear his pitch.

He turns out to be a cartel kingpin and by the time she is face to face with him, it’s too late to reject his offer. He wants to transition to a female and he needs her legal expertise to secure an overseas doctor, plus help with new identification and, finally, to relocate his wife and children to a faraway place.

This is a big deal- he must completely disappear from the face of the earth or else will surely be killed. Same for his family, who he doesn’t plan on seeing again. Plans change. The road will be fraught with peril and heartache and joy.

Saldana is already in the conversation for awards season, and with her incredible acting and dancing and passable singing, that’s a pretty sure bet. She and her other two female co-stars collectively won Best Actress at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

And who are those other two actors? They are Karla Sofía Gascón, the first transgender actress to win at Cannes, and Selena Gomez-yes, the singer/actress you already may know. Gomez is brutally convincing as the abandoned wife of the drug kingpin, whom she thinks is dead. This lady can play mean with the best of villains, and her part calls for her to change the viewer’s perception on a dime.

But it’s Gascón playing Emilia, as well as cartel head Manitos, who is the revelation here. She must go from a physically ugly and scary man to a good-hearted, empathetic lady who is so convincing in her identity and physical appearance that even those who knew Manitos don’t recognize her. It’s a very noteworthy achievement.

The songs are not like bombastic Broadway Musical tunes- they are more like brief, occasional punctuation in a given scene. There’s also a raise-the-roof dance number that shows off Zoey Saldana’s classical training and chops. To my ears, most of the cast are not trained singers (apart from Gomez, of course), but the naturalistic performances in a film that is going to be called a “musical” are perfectly suited to this story.

Yes, there are spots of Mexican melodrama within, but they don’t pull you out of the narrative.

I don’t know how one pulls off such an unusual hybrid of genres, but Jacques Audiard has a good chance of being recognized, at the very least, in the foreign language film category for his efforts. There are still many contenders to come between now and year’s end, but Emilia Pérez should be seriously considered as among the year’s best.

Currently streaming on Netflix.