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"You're a very bad influence." Who says this line, and why, and when, is a testament to the power of "Emily the Criminal," written and directed by John Patton Ford , and starring Aubrey Plaza . The film plays like a bat out of hell, all adrenaline, similar to the Safdie brothers' recent " Good Time ," although "Emily the Criminal" is more bare-bones and straightforward in its style. The film's view of the "land of opportunity" could not be more cynical. This is John Patton Ford's directorial debut, and it is an extremely impressive piece of work.

Emily is a specific individual, but she is also representative of her generation's particular struggles. She went to an expensive art school, graduating with a degree in portraiture and a mountain of debt. There is no way on earth she can ever pay it back, neither the interest nor the principal. Emily has a record. There was a DUI in college. There was also an arrest for assault. This means she can't pass a background check, a roadblock when applying for "real" jobs. She works for a GrubHub-type company as a contractor (they can cut her hours with no warning and she has no recourse). She hauls lasagna into gleaming corporate offices, where women in tailored suits mill about waiting for her to finish. She is offered a promising internship, but the internship is, of course, unpaid. She can't go without pay for five months. Who can? Emily is trapped. That is, until a co-worker introduces her to the world of credit card fraud.

A group of people gather in a warehouse and are led through the process by Youcef ( Theo Rossi ), who says up front that what they will be doing is illegal (but safe), and if anyone doesn't feel comfortable it's okay to get up and leave. His manner is quiet and kind and he inspires trust. Emily is given a fake license, a fake credit card, and instructions on what to purchase for black market re-selling. Later on, as Emily gets up to speed, Youcef gives her a taser for protection and a burner phone. He shows her how to make the credit cards. She "takes" to this. The money is addictive. The thought of getting out of debt is an overwhelming incentive. Liz, Emily's friend from art school ( Megalyn Echikunwoke ), keeps dangling the possibility of recommending Emily for a job as a graphic designer at her ad agency, highlighting the vast abyss between the two friends' circumstances. (Liz, being sent to Portugal on business, complains to Emily, "It's for only 11 days." Only!)

As the jobs get riskier and riskier, Emily's true nature is activated, calling to mind the opening scene where Emily turns a failing job interview on its ear. She never plays defense. She goes on the offense as quickly as possible. She thinks on her feet. When she decides to fight back, she can be quite frightening. She likes Youcef, an immigrant from Lebanon with dreams, things he's saving up for. Youcef likes her too. The credit card fraud aspect of "Emily the Criminal" is fascinating, a deep dive into the world of "dummy shopping," but what ignites the film overall is Aubrey Plaza's unpredictable and often thrilling performance.

Plaza "came up" through the comedy world, which proves a point I once made in a piece for Film Comment about the dramatic gifts of actors mostly known for comedy (people like Barbara Harris , Catherine O'Hara , Madeline Kahn ). Plaza is a wild card. She takes risks. Her deadpan delivery can be hilarious, but it can also be unsettling. She shifts it depending on the story's context. Her performances in " Ingrid Goes West " and " Black Bear " show her willingness to travel in some very dark waters, as well as her openness to playing "unlikable" or at least "difficult" characters. Like Kristen Wiig , Plaza has carved out her own space in which to operate. She doesn't seem beholden to the industry and its demands as other more mainstream actresses do. She feels free enough to produce something like "Emily the Criminal," devoting herself to a first-time director. This speaks to her belief in the project, and also what she is interested in as an actress. This is not ingratiating material, and she is not "ingratiating" in it.

Women don't often get to play anti-heroes. This is the territory of 1970s cinema, all of those great movies steeped in the underbelly of the failing American dream. Emily is not a character you warm up to but she is a character you can't help but root for. Youcef and Emily's bond is an interesting one, made possible by the genuine chemistry between Plaza and Rossi. In a different world, a different time, "Emily the Criminal" may very well have been a romantic drama, similar to Jacques Audiard's "Rust and Bone," mixing romance, criminality, class divides, and moral/ethical dilemmas. But "Emily the Criminal" takes place in too urgent and too dark a time. Things are serious. The system, as they say, is rigged. Emily doesn't waste time with moral qualms. As she says, shimmering with rage, “Motherf**kers will keep taking from you until you make the goddamn rules yourself.” She means what she says.

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Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Emily the Criminal (2022)

Rated R for language, some violence and brief drug use.

Aubrey Plaza as Emily

Theo Rossi as Youcef

Megalyn Echikunwoke as Liz

Gina Gershon as Alice

Jonathan Avigdori as Khalil

Bernardo Badillo as Javier

Craig Stark as Chip

Brandon Sklenar as Brent

John Patton Ford

Cinematographer

Jeff Bierman
Harrison Atkins
Nathan Halpern

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Movie Reviews

Aubrey plaza plays a fraudster in the mostly engrossing 'emily the criminal'.

Justin Chang

Aubrey Plaza plays an art-school dropout who resorts to credit card fraud in Emily the Criminal. Courtesy of Sundance Institute hide caption

Aubrey Plaza plays an art-school dropout who resorts to credit card fraud in Emily the Criminal.

For a while now, it's seemed as if there's no role too absurd or outrageous for Aubrey Plaza to play: an Instagram stalker in Ingrid Goes West , a naughty nun in The Little Hours, a flesh-eating zombie in Life After Beth .

The character she plays in Emily the Criminal — an art-school dropout who masters the art of credit-card fraud — sounds almost low-key by comparison. But if this is one of Plaza's more straightforward dramatic performances, absent of her usual deadpan-comic touches, it's also one of her strongest. She holds us at nearly every moment of this engrossing Los Angeles noir, about a woman whose luck ran out long ago, and who decides to seize control of her life and livelihood.

Emily is technically already a criminal when we meet her: She has an aggravated-assault conviction on her record that's made it hard for her to find steady work, let alone pay off her $70,000 in student loans. She barely gets by making food deliveries and sharing a crowded L.A. apartment with two roommates. Plaza plays the character with an outsider's toughness — Emily grew up in New Jersey, and we can hear it in her accent — but also the shrewdness of someone who knows when to fight back and when to go with the flow.

That talent suits her well when a lucrative but illegal opportunity comes her way. Her task is to buy some pricey electronic equipment using a phony credit card, then slip out before the theft is detected. The merchandise gets picked up and resold, and Emily gets paid $200 — not bad for an hour's work. It's supposed to be just a one-time thing, but Emily is soon hooked and coming back for more.

The man who oversees this operation and takes her under his wing is Youcef, a Lebanese immigrant played by the charismatic Theo Rossi, from shows like Sons of Anarchy and Luke Cage . Youcef realizes that Emily makes a pretty good crook, partly because few people suspect her of being one. The movie tacitly acknowledges the racist and sexist assumptions that would give a white woman an advantage in this line of work. But it also keys us into Emily's feelings of fear, anxiety and exhilaration as she starts taking on bigger, higher-stakes jobs. Soon she's got her own little racket, printing the credit cards and arranging the sales herself.

As the work gets more dangerous, Emily realizes she's going to need more than the pepper spray in her purse to defend herself. The writer-director John Patton Ford, making a solid feature debut, skillfully ratchets up the tension at key moments, and Plaza is both vulnerable and fierce as a woman having to figure out her own fight-or-flight responses in real time.

One botched early job leads to a car chase that's all the more harrowing for being so realistically staged. Youcef guides Emily through every step of her enterprise, and Plaza and Rossi's chemistry deepens as their characters' initially combative relationship gives way to romantic sparks. Naturally, their emotional bond will complicate their business dealings in all sorts of ways, some more believable than others.

As things start to unravel, the movie's third-act plotting gets a little too ragged for its own good. But if Emily the Criminal isn't always successful as a genre exercise, it's thoroughly gripping as a portrait of a woman always operating in survival mode. It's telling that even with her new source of income, Emily doesn't take anything for granted and never stops working every angle. She keeps trying to land an interview at an upscale ad agency, where interns are expected to work full-time for free. She keeps her food delivery job, even though the pay is lousy and the benefits nonexistent. What millions of American workers endure day in and day out, the movie suggests, is no less exploitative than any of Emily's illegal activities. The movie may be called Emily the Criminal , but it reserves its harshest indictment for the society that made her what she is.

Correction Aug. 18, 2022

In an earlier version of this story Aubrey Plaza's name was misspelled in a caption as Audrey.

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Emily the Criminal Reviews

Plaza projects her character’s apprehension and channels it into moral outrage directed at her attackers as well as her physical and societal limitations.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

Plaza is an indie cinema screen magnet; saying that she killed this role isn’t something that causes shock.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 29, 2023

...the film’s visual inertia undermines the tremendous significance of the story, particularly its ending...

Full Review | Jul 28, 2023

Emily the Criminal is an edge-of-your-seat thriller aimed directly at millennials, replacing the glamor and sexiness prevalent in crime films made by previous generations with an indictment against the stacked deck economy that’s become the status quo.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

It doesn't really matter what the "objective" strengths and weaknesses of the film are... it's a movie of intense emotional potency, and I suspect that whether you like it or not will come down entirely to how you react to it on a purely gut level.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023

This one [the movie], with Aubrey Plaza, is probably the best role I've ever seen her do.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Jul 24, 2023

Perhaps the realization is too distant for the character and there isn't an attempt to penetrate her psychology and motivation. Nonetheless, it's clear that the promise of the title is more than fulfilled. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 10, 2023

Far and away the most pervasive aspect of Emily the Criminal is its depiction of being on the sidelines of life in America, almost through no fault of one’s own.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2023

A small gem just waiting for viewers to discover it. You should make sure that you do.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 8, 2023

Emily the Criminal confirms Plaza as one of the most magnificent performers of our times, and she should be offered roles of every kind. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 4, 2023

As an arts graduate on the wrong side of inequality, Plaza is riveting as a young woman finding her foot in the Los Angeles underworld.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2023

Emily the Criminal is just the latest in a decade’s worth of iconic, perfect, unforgettable dramatic roles for the queen of deadpan.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2023

The movie has a social commentary that’s not preachy, putting on display the cut-off predicament that ex-cons of all ages run into. Plaza just keeps getting better and better.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Feb 19, 2023

Plaza’s tough but sympathetic performance keeps you hooked all the way.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 25, 2023

Well, what would you do?

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 17, 2023

Emily the Criminal is great at portraying the side of L.A. that we all know and love from classic noir, but also contemporizing it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 9, 2023

Aubrey Plaza is just incredible in the lead performance. She's just a skinny little thing, but she really makes you believe that she can hold her ground with bigger, tougher guys. She also makes you believe that she has real steel inside her.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jan 4, 2023

Using crippling student loan debt as a motivation for someone breaking bad as opposed to any sort of revenge plot is a genius move, and Ford loads the film with down-to-earth details that make Emily’s story feel so intrinsically rooted in the real world.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Jan 3, 2023

It's a late fest highlight, one of my faves. It remains hyper focused and never wanders, with a 96 minute runtime that is just right for this story...

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 30, 2022

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Critic’s Pick

‘Emily the Criminal’ Review: Survival Strategy

Aubrey Plaza’s wonderfully nuanced performance anchors this absorbing story of a young woman’s descent into lawlessness.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

“Want to make $200 in an hour?” reads the anonymous text, and Emily (Aubrey Plaza) absolutely does. On her own, in her thirties and out of options, Emily is struggling to repay $70,000 in student loans by working a punishing food-delivery job with no protections or a reliable schedule. A talented artist, she longs to land a graphic-design position like her best friend, Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke), but an old assault conviction makes for awkward interviews.

Humility, however, doesn’t come easily to Emily, whose instinct is always to snap back — as Liz’s smug boss (Gina Gershon) learns when she suggests Emily ought to be grateful for an unpaid internship. Scenes like this spike the film with millennial fury, their realism grounding this chilly, assured thriller (the feature debut of John Patton Ford) in recognizable situations. Emily’s belligerence seems an appropriate response to the economic trap sprung on a generation of graduates exploited by gig work and corporate internships alike. So when that initial text leads to a lucrative, seemingly simple job as a dummy shopper — purchasing expensive electronics with stolen credit cards — we feel as much relief for her as apprehension.

And, it turns out, she’s good at this. Tough-minded and cleareyed, armed only with pepper spray (she will later graduate to a Taser and box-cutter), Emily soon advances to bigger, far riskier endeavors. Under the tutelage of the charming Youcef (Theo Rossi), an immigrant with rental-property dreams, she begins to make real money. We wait for the hammer to fall, and it does; but the strength of Ford’s script (based in part on his own experience with student debt) lies in its ability to highlight the scariness of Emily’s situation without overdoing the violence, giving her journey a believability it might otherwise lack. Those few minutes between the swiping of a credit card and its authorization have never felt so fraught.

Essential to this is Plaza’s intense, subtle performance, one that should lay to rest any doubts that she can headline a drama. With almost documentarylike impassivity, Ford and his cinematographer, Jeff Bierman, scrutinize Emily with neither sympathy nor censure, her close-ups flickering equally between anxiety and resolve. And by situating the character among many drawn by desperation to scams like this, “Emily the Criminal” plays less like a lecture on the evils of capitalism than a darkly demented workplace drama, a cry of outrage from those forced to choose between legal enslavement and illegally obtained freedom.

Emily the Criminal Rated R for stealing, stabbing and swindling up a storm. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.

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Emily the criminal, common sense media reviewers.

Tense drama questions capitalism; violence, drugs, language.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Focuses primarily on how late-stage capitalism sho

Emily uses violence to address her emotional issue

Cast is diverse on surface: Aubrey Plaza is a mult

Fights, men targeting and attacking/hurting women,

Kissing. A scene that shows two characters after t

Language includes "f--k," "f---ing," "hell," "damn

Drinking by adult characters, sometimes to falling

Positive Messages

Focuses primarily on how late-stage capitalism should be adjusted (or abolished) in order to give everyone a chance to succeed on their own terms. But this commentary is made somewhat subtly, even though it's about someone who can't find a sustaining job because of bureaucracy and prejudice against formerly incarcerated people in the workforce.

Positive Role Models

Emily uses violence to address her emotional issues with men, particularly when she's in a triggering, vulnerable situation. And even though her motives might be understandable, she chooses to do illegal things to make money. But she also shows perseverance, courage, and tenacity in achieving her goals and protecting herself in vulnerable, abusive situations.

Diverse Representations

Cast is diverse on surface: Aubrey Plaza is a multicultural actress with Puerto Rican and Taino ancestry; Jonathan Avigdori is American and Israeli; Theo Rossi has Italian, Spanish, Syrian, and North African ancestry; Bernardo Badillo has Mexican ancestry. But while some actors (including Rossi and Avigdori) are playing characters who sound Middle Eastern, their characters aren't specifically defined by country or background. This makes them seem like generalized Middle Eastern characters with generalized accents, potentially reinforcing stereotypes. And while Emily is the lead, she's surrounded by men. This could be commentary on the U.S. workforce culture, but it seems more like a possible oversight in gender parity. One of the two other female characters, a nasty boss (Gina Gershon), is portrayed as part of the problem; the other, Emily's friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke), seems emblematic of the cliché of a friend who has seemingly "made it" in life and serves as an aspiration for Emily. Emily is made to be a love interest when it feels like that angle isn't necessary to flesh out her story.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Fights, men targeting and attacking/hurting women, breaking and entering, stabbing, etc. A bit of blood from injuries. General mood of tension/danger. Emily has a criminal record of domestic violence.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Kissing. A scene that shows two characters after they've had sex (partial nudity).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes "f--k," "f---ing," "hell," "damn," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Drinking by adult characters, sometimes to falling-down excess. Montage of a boisterous night out at a bar includes drug (cocaine) use.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Emily the Criminal is a tense drama/thriller about a woman ( Aubrey Plaza ) who's trying to get ahead despite feeling like the deck of capitalism is stacked against her. Her dire financial circumstances lead to her joining an illegal credit card scheme to make more money. There's a general sense of risk and danger throughout the film, as well as moments of shocking physical violence. People fight, men target and attack women, there are scenes of breaking and entering, and people get bloody injuries. Characters also kiss, have (nonexplicit) sex, drink (sometimes to falling-down excess), and use drugs (cocaine). Language is strong and includes "f--k," "damn," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 1 parent review

Plaza and the rest of the cast excel in this taut drama

What's the story.

EMILY THE CRIMINAL focuses on Emily ( Aubrey Plaza ), a woman with crushing student debt and a prior criminal record that hampers her ability to get a serious job. Desperate while working a low-wage catering gig, Emily ends up joining an illegal credit card scheme led by Youcef ( Theo Rossi ). As she increasingly turns to illegal activities, she gains self-confidence -- and possibly a financial way out of her woes.

Is It Any Good?

This tense drama/thriller takes on an issue facing many millennials and Gen Z'ers: trying to make it big in a capitalist society that feels made for the rich and/or those with endless connections. Like many people in Emily the Criminal 's target audience, Emily is faced with student debt, a culture that tells her to constantly try harder (without giving her actual help or chances), and a society that judges people with criminal records and sees them as disposable and worthless. You can see how she'd get desperate enough to throw her lot in with Youcef's scam.

While that aspect of the film is gripping, Emily the Criminal doesn't manage to capture all of the viewer's attention. That's largely because a romantic subplot feels forced into a story that had a much stronger focus when it was commenting on late-stage capitalism. Also distracting is Youcef, the mastermind behind the credit card scheme (and Emily's love interest). He presents as Middle Eastern, but it feels like the character isn't fully explored because Rossi's accent isn't authentic, and he doesn't feel fully rooted in the character. Still, he brings a bit of sparkle to the proceedings. But Plaza is the film's true heart and force. It just would have been nice if the film had focused less on Emily's love life and more on her already fascinating (and relatable) fight to be taken seriously in the workforce.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Emily the Criminal 's commentary on the U.S. economy. What do you think the film is saying about the United States' work culture and bureaucracy?

How are Emily's issues with men portrayed? How does she handle her prior trauma?

How are race and gender portrayed in the film? Why is diverse representation in the media important?

Movie Details

In theaters : August 12, 2022
Cast : Aubrey Plaza , Theo Rossi , Jonathan Avigdori , Bernardo Badillo
Director : John Patton Ford
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Bisexual actors, Latino actors
Studios : Roadside Attractions , Vertical Entertainment
Genre : Thriller
Run time : 93 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language, some violence and brief drug use
Last updated : February 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Emily the Criminal review – Aubrey Plaza charges taut thriller

A gig worker turns to credit card fraud in a tense debut feature with an electrifying central performance

I t’s hard to really blame Emily (Aubrey Plaza) for choosing a life of crime. A low-paid service gig brings nothing but stress. A seemingly inescapable student loan is gathering interest by the day. A couple of minor, years-back criminal charges have closed off a world of employment. It’s a familiar predicament that plagues many in America and even though first-time writer-director John Patton Ford might only show it in the broadest of strokes, it’s an effectively infuriating set-up.

When Emily is offered an opportunity for an extra income, she nervously inches down the rabbit hole. It starts off simple. She’s given a cloned credit card and has to buy a TV. She then takes it to her new bosses and gets paid $200. It’s easier than she anticipated and soon she’s doing it on the regular, edging closer to taskmaster Youcef (Theo Rossi) who slowly becomes more than her mentor. But how far is she willing to go?

Emily the Criminal is mostly as straightforward as its title, a punchy, pared-down little thriller about a woman rising in confidence as she falls deeper into a criminal underworld. Contemporary nods to gig economy aside, it’s a tale as old as time, of someone spurned by the system they once followed, that little voice telling them to stop gradually being silenced and while Ford isn’t trying to excuse Emily, he’s keen to try to explain her. From the stark opening scene, as a job interview turns to mulch in front of her, we see not just a barely contained frustration but a simmering fury, and every time there’s another ignominy, no matter how tiny, it chips away, pushing her closer to a world free from the same rules that have kept her trapped.

There are some fantastically charged moments of suspense – Emily trying to buy a car and drive away before the bank is called, a genuinely jolting confrontation with a double-crossing client – and Ford has a knack for making us sweat without relying on an over-egged score or over-stacked stakes. It’s a genre movie with its feet firmly on the ground, small in scale and tight in focus. Plaza, an actor with a history of bringing out her finest work at Sundance (from The Little Hours to Black Bear to a career-best turn in Ingrid Goes West), is incredibly engaging here, a rare dramatic role that demands only the tiniest moments of comedy. The script, which at times can be a little rushed, requires some major leaps for the character but she works hard to make us buy them, never urging us to agree with what she’s doing and how she’s doing it but never causing us to second-guess her. There’s also a crackling chemistry with Rossi even if some of the crime world plotting gets a little thin as the film hurtles toward a finale of no return.

If Ford doesn’t quite stick the landing – a late-stage backstory reveal is pretty limp, the final scene a little underwhelming – the journey there is more than worth it, an on-form Plaza drawing us close even when he briefly loosens his grip. It’s an undeniably striking debut, slick and involving enough to have us curiously excited for whatever he decides to do next.

Emily the Criminal is showing at the Sundance film festival and is released on digital platforms in the UK on 21 October.

Aubrey Plaza
Sundance 2022
Sundance film festival

Emily the Criminal (2022)

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‘emily the criminal’: film review | sundance 2022.

John Patton Ford's debut stars Aubrey Plaza as a debt-saddled woman drawn into a life of crime.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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A cool, confident debut whose steady build mirrors the increasing stakes faced by its namesake, John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal is a nail-biter that makes the most of the tough side Aubrey Plaza has shown in even her most comic performances.

Though always a presence to contend with, Plaza commands the screen here, playing a character many will relate to — until the point at which they realize they’re nowhere near this bold. Costar Theo Rossi makes a strong showing as well, bringing a knowing edge to a film that rides the line between working-class realism and pure genre thrills.

Emily the Criminal

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)

Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Gina Gershon

Director-Screenwriter: John Patton Ford

Plaza’s Emily is eking out a living under hard conditions that are no less relatable for being largely self-inflicted. She owes $70,000 for an education she never completed, and her prospects for a decent-paying job are crippled by a felony assault conviction. The Jersey native is no creampuff, and pushes back at the first sign she’s being taken advantage of. It’s kind of a marvel she’s employed at all, even in a crummy “independent contractor” delivery job. It’s also a wonder she can still be friends with Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke), the art-school pal whose advertising job takes her to glamorous places like Portugal.

Full credits

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres) Production company: Low Spark Films Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Gina Gershon Director-Screenwriter: John Patton Ford Producers: Tyler Davidson, Aubrey Plaza, Drew Sykes Executive Producers: Kevin Flanigan, Dexter Braff, Angus Wall, Kent Kubena, Lowell Shapiro, Mike Dill Director of photography: Jeff Bierman Production designer: Liz Toonkel Costume designer: Amanda Wing Yee Lee Editor: Harrison Atkins Composer: Nathan Halpern Casting directors: Chelsea Ellis Bloch, Marisol Roncali

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Emily the Criminal’ on Netflix, Starring an Inspired-As-Ever Aubrey Plaza as a Disillusioned Millennial Pushed to Break the Law

Where to stream:.

Emily The Criminal
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Now available on Netflix after landing on VOD services like Prime Video earlier this year, Emily the Criminal is a remarkable point on the arc of Aubrey Plaza’s career. We likely first recognized her in Parks and Recreation or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World , cocked an eyebrow at Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever (she was the voice!), realized she was far funnier than Dirty Grandpa and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates deserved, watched with fascination as she explored darker, more complicated characters in indie dramas Ingrid Goes West and Black Bear , and has finally captured the attention of EVERYONE thanks to her work in The White Lotus Season 2. Now she’s in nearly every shot of Emily the Criminal , a microdrama fueled by Millennial disillusionment, and it’s not an eye-opener, because we pretty much knew she could anchor a heavy ship like this – it’s more of an eye-widener, and her best vehicle yet.

EMILY THE CRIMINAL : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An older white guy interviews Emily (Plaza) for a job – something to do with keeping hospital records. He says he hasn’t run a background check, and asks if she has anything on her criminal record. A DUI, she says, a youthful mistake. He then pulls out the background check detailing an aggravated assault conviction. Who caught who in a lie? We can’t help but empathize with Emily – he fibbed first. Entrapped her with a duplicitous, demeaning, condescending power move. She walks out, but gives him a piece of her mind first. We’ll eventually learn she isn’t one to let someone else have the final word.

When did the assault happen? Recently? A few years ago? Several years? Several, it seems. The details are sketchy, but it seems to have derailed her life. She lives in Los Angeles, working a backbreaking “independent contractor” job delivering food for a catering company. She shares a small apartment with annoying roommates. She has $70,000 in student loan debt. She sketches portraits of people on the street in her sketchpad – the remnants of her artistic aspirations. Her longtime friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke) has a cush gig at an ad agency, and she makes vague promises to Emily about getting her an interview in the design department. Emily and Liz meet for a drink, and one drink turns into them snorting powder in the bathroom and peeling themselves off the sidewalk.

A co-worker gives Emily a phone number – a hookup for a gig where she can make $200 in an hour. She follows the lead to a shady warehouse where she’s given a fake ID and a stolen credit card. She buys a $2,000 TV from a big-box store, hands it over to the bosses and gets cash in an envelope. One of the guys running this operation is Youcef (Theo Rossi), who’s nice while his cousin and business partner is brusque and rude. Is that a spark of attraction between Emily and Youcef? I’d say so. What can she do next? Take this burner phone, come back tomorrow, and the payday will be $2,000. This time, she’s buying a BMW from a car lot that looks to be, shall we say, non-corporate . She has eight minutes to get out of there before they realize the credit card is fraudulent and she doesn’t make it and the guy attacks her and she peels out of there with the BMW and he chases her and she stops and pepper-sprays the guy and drives off and gets away and has an anxiety attack. But she got the job done. Like I said, she isn’t one to let someone else have the final word.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Besides a few moments of screw-twisting tension that recall Good Time or a Jeremy Saulnier movie , it’s a tight descent-into-darkness character study along the lines of Rebecca Hall in Christine or Robin Williams in One Hour Photo .

Performance Worth Watching: Plaza revels in the moral ambiguities of this character, and the vulnerability of her performance has us following her down a slippery slope of justification and righteous entitlement. Aside from a couple of typically destructive deadpan-comic line readings, it’s her most traditionally dramatic role, and she executes it with skill and complexity.

Memorable Dialogue: “Sorry, how much interest is being added a month?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Plaza and first-time feature writer/director John Patton Ford are a potent team. Emily the Criminal gives us a character who’s tried and tried and tried to play the capitalism game, and realized the rules are rigged in the system’s favor. She’s working her way through the student-loan scam, the unpaid-internship scam, the gig-economy scam and the one-strike-and-you’re-screwed scam, and it’s about time she scammed it back. Think about it: Identity theft is less likely to hurt an individual and more likely to hurt a big bank (that can absorb many, many more relatively tiny financial hits). Emily finds it empowering to punch back. Her situation is such that we’re almost inclined to believe that credit card fraud isn’t such a bad idea. It’s like Robin Hood robbing the rich and giving to the poor; it has the allure of punk rock.

Of course, there’s also the question of that one strike against Emily. What exactly happened there? We’re not privy to that. We also see her tendencies to party hard and escalate situations instead of accepting defeat. It all points at her getting a thrill out of subverting the law and flirting with danger; this stuff lurks in the margins of Plaza’s performance (which brings to mind Bryan Cranston’s in Breaking Bad , but to a more succinct degree), and plays out during sequences of intense, dangerous, nerve-frazzling suspense, which Emily bounces back from with surprising what-doesn’t-kill-me-only-makes-me-stronger energy. The film more strongly emphasizes how late-stage capitalism sows disillusionment in the American dream, and creates reactionaries and criminals. It’s not a subtle statement, but in Ford and Plaza’s hands, it’s a potent one.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Plaza is great here. Can’t wait to see what she does in Coppola’s Megalopolis – and on and beyond that.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com .

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‘Emily the Criminal’ Review: Aubrey Plaza Is a Sympathetic Scammer in This Cold Character Study

The devilish loans made her do it in this cold and thin character study about an art student who turns to crime.

By Amy Nicholson

Amy Nicholson

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“ Emily the Criminal ,” by John Patton Ford , is a world-weary social problem fable about a young girl who enters the woods — make that, modern day Los Angeles — and confronts three big bad job interviews. One job asks her to be a crook, one job treats her like a crook, and one job pays so little it’s essentially stealing from her. The girl, Emily ( Aubrey Plaza ) is an embittered art student with $70,000 in college debt, a felony conviction for aggravated assault and essentially no leverage to negotiate her terms of employment besides the pepper spray in her purse, which won’t help much for the two white-collar gigs. The title of this chilly thriller announces which job she picks. Her circumstances explain why. But despite the fact that the camera rarely backs away from studying Plaza’s wary eyes and tense mouth in close-up, this character piece feels as distanced from its taciturn subject as if it was merely monitoring her on security camera.

Plaza, who also produced the film, is strong as a scammer who invites sympathy and simultaneously pushes it away. Her Emily finds work as a “dummy shopper” who buys legit goods on stolen credit cards and resells her expensive purchases before the store catches on. The idea, which we only see in action twice, is that Emily must slap down big money without drawing attention to herself. It’s a fluorescent-lit noir that spends a fair amount of time near the anonymous big box stores scattered across Los Angeles, which as cinematographer Jeff Bierman sees it, is a city that’s dim even in the daylight.

Emily isn’t a local. She’s a Jersey girl — her accent announces it before she can — and here in California, she’s folded her refusal to blend in into her brand. There’s a playful moment in a party scene where she brags about her badass East Coast roots alongside her one and only friend Lucy (Megalyn Echikunwoke), a posher type on track to succeed as artist-of-sorts in corporate marketing, code for being an aspirational sell-out. That one giggle is nearly all we come to know about Emily, who’s been forced into the habit of lying about her background, besides a brief mention of a grandmother. Rather than make her a believable person, the film insists Emily is bizarrely alone for a girl who can charm the cocaine out of any rando in a bar bathroom.

This isolation gives the script an excuse to let Emily fall for her underworld boss, Youcef (Theo Rossi), a Lebanese immigrant who swears he’s just hawking stolen TVs and cars to buy his mom (Sheila Korsi) a fourplex apartment. We’re asked to believe that Youcef’s dear mama raised two polar-opposite boys: one sweetheart who seems like he’d be more at home managing an ice cream shop, and his older brother Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori), the big boss of their crooked warehouse, who shows as much loyalty to his family as a snake egg in a robin’s nest.

Emily and Youcef are united in that they’re both ambitious young people with small scale goals. Neither is out to rule the L.A. crime syndicate; they just want enough cash to feel free. Here, people like them without good options live lives that are already behind invisible bars. To Ford, choosing crime can be suspenseful — when things get tense, Nathan Halpern’s music takes on the tempo of a nervous heartbeat — but it’s not necessarily wrong if the audience can be convinced that Emily is simply defending her own right to survive.

But Emily is a criminal, too, more so than the film initially wants to let on, and while it’s to the director’s credit that he acknowledges some culpability for Emily’s own bad choices, Ford isn’t sure what he wants the audience to do with that information — or Plaza’s committed performance. There’s a good scene when Emily attends her first crime training sessions in Youcef and Khalil’s makeshift classroom, which plays out with a straight-faced mundanity as though getting trained in credit card theft is no different than learning to make sales calls. Ford makes a point of showing that she’s the only young, female, fair-skinned contractor in the room, and notes in passing that Javier (Bernardo Badillo), the man who connects Emily to the job, doesn’t get the same chance to advance.

The film offers the faintest suggestion that Emily’s best talent as a thief is that she’s able to slip around undetected and take advantage of the racist stereotype that the face of criminality is Black or brown and male, but doesn’t particularly want to explore that idea. It’s also strikingly incurious about how Emily is often a lousy crook who repeatedly bungles Youcef’s safety rules. The movie would rather the audience root for her when she’s forced to fight back against those who’ve done her dirty, even though fighting is what screwed up her life to begin with.

At best, “Emily the Criminal” uses its lead character to represent a generation forced into toxic self-reliance. Emily is one of many young adults caught in the squeeze between the costly swindle of college debt and the working world’s extortionist demand that interns do unpaid labor and be grateful for the “opportunity.” Who’s the real criminal in a broken economic system? Everyone, the film says. But it never dares to answer the follow-up question: Does Emily alone deserve a pardon?

Reviewed online, Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), Jan. 24, 2022. Running time: 96 MIN.

Production: A Low Spark Films presentation of an Evil Hag, Low Spark Films production, in association with Fear Knot Prods. (World sales: Low Spark Films, Los Angeles.) Producers: Tyler Davidson, Aubrey Plaza, Drew Sykes. Co-producer: Katie Sanders. Executive producers: Dexter Braff, Mike Dill, Kevin Flanigan, Kent Kubena, Lowell Shapiro, Angus Wall.
Crew: Director, writer: John Patton Ford. Camera: Jeff Bierman. Editor: Harrison Atkins. Music: Nathan Halpern.
With: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Jonathan Avigdori.

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Summary Emily (Aubrey Plaza) is saddled with student debt and locked out of the job market due to a minor criminal record. Desperate for income, she takes a shady gig as a “dummy shopper,” buying goods with stolen credit cards supplied by a handsome and charismatic middleman named Youcef (Theo Rossi). Faced with a series of dead-end job intervie ... Read More

Directed By : John Patton Ford

Written By : John Patton Ford

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Review: Aubrey Plaza kills it in ‘Emily the Criminal’

Aubrey Plaza appears in "Emily the Criminal" by John Patton Ford, an official selection of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

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Aubrey Plaza knows a thing or two about stealing. With her laserlike glare and killer deadpan timing, she can say absolutely nothing and slyly pocket a scene. Given the right setup, her characters can push memorably against the boundaries of acceptable behavior, mixing absurdity and menace in often dangerously unstable proportions. It’s what made her such a sympathetic stalker in “Ingrid Goes West” and such a riotous naughty nun in “The Little Hours.” She pulled off maybe her stealthiest act of cinematic larceny in “Happiest Season,” a cheerful holiday rom-com in which Plaza, a supporting player, nonetheless positioned herself as a plausible, even preferable, romantic ideal.

Plaza doesn’t have to steal scenes in “Emily the Criminal.” She plays the title role, and nearly every moment — starting with the one where Emily storms out (not for the last time) of a degrading job interview — rightly belongs to her. Written and directed by the first-time feature filmmaker John Patton Ford, the movie is both an engrossing thriller and a pointed takedown of predatory capitalism, with a protagonist who straddles a hellish Venn diagram of student loan debts, exploitative labor practices and sheer rotten luck. Emily has a hell of a sob story, though her natural discretion and refusal of self-pity keep it from sounding like one. She also has an aggravated-assault conviction on her record, which makes it nearly impossible for her to find steady work, let alone pay off the $70,000 she owes for an unfinished art degree.

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Ford doesn’t reveal the circumstances behind that assault conviction right away, and apart from a few details — Emily hails from New Jersey and has the accent to prove it — he keeps her background fairly vague. He wants to hold us at a partial remove from Emily, to suggest something of her capacity for violence while keeping us firmly on her side. Not that it’s hard to empathize: Whatever happened in the past, she’s putting forth a good-faith effort to get her act together in the present. She shares a cramped L.A. apartment with two roommates and just about gets by making food deliveries, an independent-contractor gig with predictably lousy wages, no benefits and inflexible hours. A jet-setting college friend (Megalyn Echikunwoke) is forever promising to help Emily get her foot in the door at an upscale ad agency, dangling a beautiful future they both know will never arrive.

It’s one of Emily’s co-workers (Bernardo Badillo) who slips her an actual opportunity, albeit an illegal one. A smooth operator named Youcef (a very good Theo Rossi) lays out the rules: As a “dummy shopper,” Emily will go to a big-box store and purchase some electronic equipment using a phony credit card, then slip out before the theft is discovered. The merchandise will be picked up and resold, and she’ll be paid $200 — not bad for an hour’s work. And Emily, to her surprise, anxiety and excitement, turns out to be very good at this kind of work, partly because few people suspect her of doing it. One of the movie’s more honest if tacit points is how a white woman might get the benefit of the doubt — and even get ahead — in ways that Emily’s fellow dummy shoppers, some of them Black and Latino men, clearly do not.

A man in the passenger seat of a car looks back at a woman in the back seat.

But whatever Emily may represent sociologically, she is first and foremost a figure of sustained and highly specific dramatic interest. One of the pleasures of Plaza’s performance is the way she shows us a person working out her fight-or-flight instincts in real time, and in ever more dangerous transactional situations. We see Emily’s caution and recklessness duke it out when she’s confronted by a suspicious car dealer or, in an especially harrowing episode, a knife-wielding robber. We also savor her growing satisfaction when, with Youcef’s help, she launches her own racket, printing the credit cards, picking up the merchandise and arranging the resales herself. All this takes place on an array of almost palpably unlovely Los Angeles locations, filmed here with a restless run-and-gun immediacy. (Ford’s skilled collaborators include Jeff Bierman, who handled the movie’s handheld cinematography, and Nathan Halpern, who composed the steadily pulsing score.)

It falls to Youcef, a Lebanese immigrant with his own hard-luck backstory, to give this modern-day noir its requisite whisper of romantic fatalism. Given the initially combative, increasingly sexy sparks that fly between him and Emily, this development is both unsurprising and far from unwelcome. Still, as Emily and Youcef’s business arrangement becomes mired in emotional complications, Ford’s plotting loses some of its earlier tautness; the closing stretch turns looser and more ragged even as it pushes both characters to new levels of desperation. But if the movie doesn’t entirely work as a genre exercise, it’s on more assured footing as a portrait of a woman who’s learned to operate in a permanent survival mode.

It’s telling that even when her credit-card fraud operation starts taking off, Emily knows better than to coast, or to neglect her other sources of income. She keeps making her food deliveries and keeps hustling for that big-break interview, which allows Ford to tuck in a few side points about the injustices of the gig economy and — in a scene likely to inspire head nods — of full-time unpaid internships. It isn’t hard work that bothers Emily; it’s how little she and (by extension) millions of Americans get in return for their hard work, thanks to social forces more cruelly, immorally exploitative than any one individual’s unlawful activities. This may be the story of Emily the criminal, but Ford reserves his harshest indictment for the system that created her.

‘Emily the Criminal’

Rating: R, for language, some violence and brief drug use Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes Playing: Starts Aug. 12 in general release

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‘Emily the Criminal’: Aubrey Plaza Wants to Stick It to the Man

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Early in Emily the Criminal , Emily Benetto ( Aubrey Plaza , sporting a New Jersey-native accent) is asked about her permanent record in a job interview. It’s a trick question. Despite telling her otherwise, this prospective employer has already done a background check. They already know about the low points on her rap sheet. So they know, when she tries to explain herself, that she’s lying, or at least only telling half of the truth.

It’s about “trust,” you understand. You can imagine why someone with a record who’s desperately in need of a job might fudge the details of their past, especially if they think they won’t get caught. Desperation does that. Getting a job might feel worth the risk. That’s the trap set for Emily more than once in this minor pressure cooker of a movie. Emily has essentially — professionally, anyway — been condemned.

The rap sheet is only part of her problem. There’s the $70,000 in student debt that makes getting a job that much more urgent. There’s the fact that she wants to be an artist — that, in addition to having money, with a job she would also have the space to do her own work, which happens not to be lucrative work. The legitimate work she does find, food delivery, proves demeaning. The movie goes so far as to have Emily’s boss remind her that she’s a nobody — no rights, no contract, no union, no leg to stand on when lodging a complaint. And the people she has to deliver to, young professionals on their lunch breaks, make it worse. This is her peer group. These are people not unlike her good friend from high school, Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who tries to get Emily a job at a design firm. Doesn’t work out. Emily the Criminal is primarily a movie about the bottom line. It is motivated, nudged along, and finally overburdened with a sense of “What else can she do?” What some people might call choices this movie sees as a staggering array of non-options and humiliations. Its purview is plainly generational: the student debt, the nod to the shitty instability of the gig economy, the conflict between creative life and economic need. The movie has points to make; when Emily yells or pushes back, it’s the movie pushing back in turn, offering up fistfuls of reprimand and condemnation.

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You can tell from Emily the Criminal ’s look and feel — the capable but unshowy camerawork and the dressed-down appeal of its star — that the movie is going for something like grit. The title also helps. What else can Emily do? Well, she can make money the old fashioned way. Crime. Through a stroke of luck — maybe good, but also kind of bad — she lands the number of a Lebanese man named Youcef (Theo Rossi) and falls into a criminal network involving credit card fraud and plenty of personal risk. Bloody noses and bad bruises follow. You’re supposed to think that this is too risky, isn’t worth it. You might also step back from the movie’s rapid sense of escalation, from Emily’s quick rise through the ranks, and have a question or two about how and why she became so good at what she does. Emily the Criminal makes sense for the moment. Writer-director John Patton Ford has sculpted this realistic thriller, with its regional accents and ugly-pretty street views of this underground L.A. economy, into something like a Dardennes brothers movie, or better yet, like lo-fi indie in the style of Ramin Bahrani, whose Man Push Cart and Chop Shop really had the early aughts’ number, reminding us that the sacrifices and hardships often associated with the 2008 crash were already a reality for America’s immigrant working class. What defines this genre, beyond a pared-down, economical style, is a nauseating sense of contingency. These are films about people whose lives are about as stable as a house of cards in an earthquake. The films, imitating reality to various degrees, go out of their way to make the ground shake.

Emily the Criminal isn’t as subtle as its forebears. Its talky attitude toward its politics is out of place in a movie that feels almost too extreme otherwise, with an ascent into choices and plot twists that are laudably ridiculous, but also a bit out of sync. It’s an OK movie because of its actors’ performances (including some powerfully myopic mean-mugging from Gina Gershon, in a scene that lands the “right” jabs but without any real sense of risk). Plaza, normally a comedian, almost passes for a normal person, which is what this movie needs. Even as the film’s sense of Emily’s character wavers and wanders and grows implausible without the satisfaction of becoming an outright genre movie, the performance is consistent. As a social tract, Emily the Criminal is more impassioned than wise. As a thriller, it fares better — in that case, no one’s asking for wisdom.

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Emily The Criminal Review

When we meet Emily ( Aubrey Plaza ), she seems like a fairly typical struggling millennial. Up to her eyebrows in college debt, but unable to find the kinds of employment that her degree was supposed to secure, due to a prior felony conviction which employers run a mile from, she’s stuck working for a food delivery company to service spiralling college debt interest.

Written and directed by John Patton Ford, the film does a good job of setting up Emily’s circumstances. They are pretty dire, but also plausible. To top it all off, her college mates are thriving, and don’t appear to really understand that she simply doesn’t have as much money as them. When a fast food co-worker offers to connect her with a company offering $200 to “dummy shoppers”, you totally buy that she would go along with it, even when the scheme is revealed to be a credit card fraud operation. It’s not a spoiler — look at the title of the film — to reveal that the scams are only going to get bigger and bolder.

As neatly set-up as the world of the film is, it wouldn’t work half as well without Aubrey Plaza’s brilliantly specific lead performance, portraying Emily as an emotionally shut-down woman on the edge. There’s no hysteria, but plenty of desperation. Plaza is the kind of performer who has been lauded for her ability to play low-key snarky weirdos, from early roles like Parks And Recreation 's April onwards, and it would have been so easy for her to parlay that persona into roles demanding zero evolution, simply snarking her way to the top of ever bigger films with ever bigger budgets.

But while she’s not averse to a payday gig ( Dirty Grandpa , anyone?), she has also consistently sought out weirder work, where she gets to do more than just deadpan. To a list including the brilliant Ingrid Goes West and Black Bear , you can now add Emily The Criminal , which might just be her best showcase yet.

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Emily the Criminal review: Aubrey Plaza scores as a gig-economy hustler

Crime thrillers love to insist that crime doesn’t pay, which is pretty rich, since staying on the straight and narrow isn’t exactly lucrative either. While so many of these glorified Old Testament cautionary tales posit dollar-signs-over-the-eyes greed as the motive for leaping into the choppy waters of illegal transgression, anyone just trying to get by in the rigged system of American capitalism might draw a different conclusion. Why play by the rules when the only way to win — or maybe even to survive — is to break them?

That’s the question mulled, early and often, by the title character of Emily the Criminal , an economical gig-economy noir from writer-director John Patton Ford. Emily (Aubrey Plaza, reliably and superbly barbed) is a few years out of college and buried in $75,000 of student debt. Early on, she makes a phone call to the loan office to find out why a recent payment isn’t reflected on her statement. Turns out it went entirely to the interest , not the principal. It’s a scene guaranteed to inspire mass shudders of traumatic recognition from an audience very familiar with the Sisyphean ordeal of paying back predatory lenders.

Aubrey Plaza spikes her signature hostility with a sympathetic weariness.

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Emily, a graphic designer by training but not trade, has a couple of felonies on her record — youthful mistakes that brought her time at university to a close and left her largely unhirable. To make ends meet, she works long hours for little pay as an independent contractor at a catering company. Plaza has played more than her share of tough, testy, take-no-shit customers, but here she spikes her signature hostility with a sympathetic weariness: Facing a future dimmed by insurmountable financial obligation, Emily has hardened into a classic Aubrey Plaza antiheroine , with no savings and even fewer fucks left to give.

In fact, so slim are Emily’s occupational prospects that when a coworker tips her off to an opportunity to make a quick, tax-free $200, she barely hesitates to follow the lead. This is her induction into the lawless world of “dummy shopping,” a scam that entails using stolen credit card information to purchase expensive items from stores so they can then be flipped on the street. The operation is run by the cool-headed Youcef (Theo Rossi), who doesn’t so much seduce Emily into a life of crime as gently open the door to it. And can we blame her for stepping through? Youcef’s scheme is basically a shadow version of her “legit” independent contractor work; she has no protections in this field either, but the hours are more flexible and the rates much better.

Ford lends this petty outlaw milieu an appealing neorealism, both in the small-potatoes scale of the crimes being committed and in the observational bob of his handheld camera, which trails Emily through the ins and outs of a strip-mall empire of larceny and identity theft. The film flirts with a Scorsesian procedural interest, but there aren’t many conspiratorial details to obsess over here — the mechanics of Youcef’s organized crime are almost comically straightforward and uncomplicated. They do, however, lend themselves to some crackerjack suspense sequences , like the moment where Emily has to complete the purchase of a sports car and get away in the mere eight minutes before her credit card comes up as stolen, or the harrowing home invasion she invites when agreeing to meet some buyers too close to her apartment.

Emily’s traipse into lawbreaking has the specificity and the mundanity of a story yanked from the headlines.

Outdated flip phones situate Emily the Criminal in an unspecified recent past — just one element that gives the film the misleading vibe of true crime , when in fact it’s an entirely fictional concoction. Seriously, it’s almost hard to believe all of this isn’t adapted from a magazine article. Emily’s traipse into lawbreaking has the specificity and the mundanity of a story yanked from the headlines. It also, unfortunately, slides in its second half into the kind of generically “urgent” melodrama screenwriters will often impose on interesting real-world events that don’t require it. Emily’s eventual romance with Youcef and the story’s ultimate tilt into backstabbing and violence feel artificial in comparison to Ford’s more convincing, low-to-the-ground depiction of someone pulled inexorably into a rather unglamorous criminal enterprise.

Veneer of grittiness aside, Emily the Criminal is ultimately something of a fantasy, shrewdly targeted at a postgraduate workforce crushed by debt, a bleak job market, and the sucker bet of tethering your future to employers who see you as nothing more than cheap, expendable labor. It is, in other words, a caper for our age of late-stage capitalism, free of any moralistic hand-wringing about the true cost of crime. And in Plaza, it finds the ideal microphone for the outrage it’s channeling. Her furious outbursts during a pair of bookending job interviews are more than relatable. They’re basically the lament of a generation choking on false promises, and ready for the desperate measures called for by our desperate times.

Emily the Criminal is now playing in select theaters. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please visit his Authory page .

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In the meantime, we're throwing this month's spotlight on Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, the 1984 version of Dune, and the 2014 remake of Godzilla. For the rest of the best sci-fi movies on Max, just keep scrolling down.

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If you want to watch the game, you better pick a streaming option below soon, as it starts at 7:00 p.m. ET. It will be televised locally only on NESN (Bruins markets) and Bally Sports Florida (Panthers markets). But if you don't have those channels or you live out of market, there are some different ways you can watch a live stream. Is There a Free Bruins vs Panthers Live Stream?

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Emily the Criminal Movie Review: Aubrey Plaza Dazzles in a Tense and Lean Thriller

Review: Emily the Criminal is a tense star vehicle for one of the industry’s biggest risers, the committed and ambitious Aubrey Plaza. The movie lives and dies by her performance, and she’s able to carry the weight of this thriller a majority of the time.

aubrey plaza emily the criminal movie 2022

The films that are the toughest to write thoughtful and genuine criticism for are films like Emily the Criminal . Not because they are bad, but because they are rock solid in what they are trying to do, but don’t expand much beyond being a reliable genre entry. Emily the Criminal is exactly that. It has a simple and effective narrative, a lean runtime, and enough action along the way to make it worthwhile.

Emily the Criminal is also a star vehicle for one of the industry’s biggest risers. Along with starring in the newest season of HBO Max’s The White Lotus , Aubrey Plaza has had a busy year. Emily the Criminal is one of the few films in her career that falls solely on her shoulders. It passes if she is effective and fails if she is not. But it’s safe to say that she delivers in one of the year’s most concise films.

Aubrey Plaza plays the title character Emily, who is swimming in student loan debt and a criminal record that inhibits her from landing stable jobs. When she’s invited to help in a credit card fraud scheme, she soon finds herself wrapped in the criminal underworld in Los Angeles – a world that presents danger around every corner. As she dives deeper and deeper into her new profession, she finds that leaving her new world is much more difficult than entering it.

The premise may sound cliché or unoriginal, but one aspect of Emily the Criminal that works in its favor is that it feels notably fresh compared to its crime genre counterparts. There aren’t genre films being made that make an honest effort to relate to and understand college students and adults entering the work force. I can’t say that I’ve seen a film centered around student loans as a plot device in a thriller, but I dug it and found it quite effective.

But again, I may have felt otherwise if the material wasn’t being handled by such an accomplished and seasoned actress. Aubrey Plaza plays the insecure, intimidated young adult perfectly, and it’s the central crux of the film that allows the rest of it to play out without any hallow emotion or weight. It bounces from plot point to plot point with few snags or missteps along the way.

Characterization can be pretty bland throughout, mainly because the film doesn’t spend much time building on each character’s one driving motive throughout. Emily’s handler Youcef (played by the likable and charming Theo Rossi ) wants to develop property and make safer income for himself, but there isn’t much beyond this piece to his character.

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Even Emily herself is given just enough backstory for the character to work and fit, but there isn’t enough here to make her a well-rounded main character. It forces the film to operate at a higher level in atmosphere and tensity, and for the most part it works, but it stops Plaza from being able to elevate as an actress.

Emily the Criminal also struggles to conclude in a plausible and profound way. I struggled with how the story ended for Emily and where we left her as the credits began to roll. Perhaps the film is attempting to portray that once crime enters your life, it’s impossible to fully break free from it. Or maybe, quite honestly, how young adults are treated as they enter the workforce out of college. Emily the Criminal has a large meting pot of ideas, but it struggles to convey them in ways that are easy to grasp onto as it ends.

But Emily the Criminal is still an effective and fun thriller. Aubrey Plaza excels in the material she’s given, and there’s enough of a runway to make an impact as a performer. First time director John Patton Ford proves he has a talent for ramping up tension and setting stakes in a marketable fashion, and how to find an audience and connect to them. It won’t have your jaw on the floor as it ends, but the ride is worth the price of admission (even if the price is just a monthly subscription to Netflix at the moment).

Genre: Crime , Drama , Thriller

Watch Emily the Criminal (2022) on Netflix and VOD here

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Emily the Criminal Movie Cast and Credits

Aubrey Plaza as Emily

Theo Rossi as Youcef

Megalyn Echikunwoke as Liz

Gina Gershon as Alice

Jonathan Avigdori as Khalil

Craig Stark as Chip

Director: John Patton Ford

Writer: John Patton Ford

Cinematography: Jeff Bierman

Editor: Harrison Atkins

Composer: Nathan Halpern

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Emily the Criminal review: Aubrey Plaza goes outlaw in a pitch-black comic thriller

The actress shines in this spiky Sundance breakout about a woman finding better living through felonies.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

Give a girl in a gig economy a chance: that's all Aubrey Plaza's broke protagonist in Emily the Criminal (which premiered last night at the Sundance Film Festival ) is looking for. But $70,000 in college debt and half a degree from art school don't really polish up a resumé; neither does a rap sheet that includes a DUI and, as one potential employer helpfully points out in the movie's opening scene, a conviction for aggravated assault. If Nomadland was a tone poem about being poor, white, and female on the fringes of American life, Emily is more like a silent scream: a scrappy pitch-black study of just how easy it is to step into the void.

Once an aspiring painter and now a perspiring cater-waiter, Emily can barely pay off the interest on her student loans, let alone the principal. She shares her L.A. apartment with a roommate who hardly speaks to her (in fact, she doesn't seem to speak English at all) and rarely leaves the house to socialize unless it's drinks with her one college friend ( Almost Family 's Megalyn Echikunwoke), whose thriving ad-agency career mostly serves to remind her of how bleak her own prospects are.

So when a coworker offers her a phone number on a scrap of paper one day, she takes it — and finds that she has a knack for what turns out to be a massive credit-card racket: Take the stolen identities a man named Yusuf ( Theo Rossi ) provides, buy a large appliance, flip it. When she passes the first test, Yusuf graduates her to bigger stuff and lets her start cutting her own cards. To his credit, though, writer-director John Patton Ford doesn't turn what follows into a zippy bling-ring montage; instead, he drills down on the messiness and occasional abject terror of essentially criming without a net.

Bluffing might be half the job, but when Emily goes out to buy a new car or another flat-screen with someone else's money, there's no getaway driver waiting for her on the other side; if things go wrong — as they do more than once, spectacularly — she's on her own. Her only ally is Yusuf, and soon he's more than that: Between them, they may even figure out how to find their own American dream, albeit feloniously. But can "easy" money ever really be easy? As grim as the synopsis sounds, Ford imbues his story with a tense, vibrating energy, moving briskly between the breathlessness of a heist thriller and the sharper barbs of social satire.

And he has an ideal muse in Plaza, whose slow-blinking lemur eyes and sour-candy acidity have made her a go-to for roles that require a kind of simmering, furious intelligence. (In one scene where she faces off with a womansplaining executive played by Gina Gershon , it feels for a moment like her rage might actually conduct electricity). Lank-haired and perpetually on edge, she makes Emily's tumble into the underworld believable — and more importantly, interesting. She may be a wanton criminal, but she's also a woman very much for these times: Not the anti-heroine we knew we needed, maybe, but one that we deserve. Grade: B+

Follow E.W.'s ongoing coverage out of Sundance here.

Emily the Criminal Isn’t Interested in Empathy

Emily the Criminal has an awfully cute title for a movie so bubbling over with rage. Paired with the fact that its star is Aubrey Plaza, an actor best known for her comedic deadpan, it might bring forth thoughts of twee adventures into minor misbehavior and eventual redemption — as though Emily the Strange grew up and started dabbling in delinquency. But there isn’t anything remotely cloying in how writer-director John Patton Ford’s lean, effective debut treats its title character’s journey into credit-card fraud. To make that clear, Emily gets her face smashed into a car door early in the movie. After her first experience as a “dummy shopper” for a gang of credit-card thieves goes well — $200 to buy a flat-screen using a stolen number — she signs on for something trickier. She’s sent to a car dealership knowing she has only eight minutes to get away with the vehicle before the bank calls back to let the owners know the charge isn’t legitimate. As she struggles to look relaxed, making small talk and filling out paperwork, time ticks nauseatingly by. She’s not out of the lot when someone roughly intervenes, but she makes it anyway, terrified and furious, with blood streaming from her nose after the skirmish. That one paid $2,000, and she needs the money.

A thriller fueled less by an interest in crime than by its protagonist’s volcanic anger at her own downward mobility, Emily the Criminal is about someone left just outside the professional class, close enough to peer in — literally glancing into the glass-walled conference rooms at the offices to which she delivers lunch. While she and her best friend, Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke), grew up in Newark together, went to art school together, and moved to Los Angeles together, Liz now works at a hip ad agency while Emily’s kicking around in catering jobs. She’s trapped in financial straits she’s beginning to understand she’ll never get out of, with $70,000 in student loans and a felony-assault conviction that turns job interviews, like the one the movie begins with, into exercises in humiliation. Liz keeps teasing the possibility of getting Emily a job at her company, but it never seems to be the right moment. When one of Emily’s co-workers puts her in touch with the credit-card ring, she’s skittish but intrigued by the potential for easy cash — enough that when Youcef (Theo Rossi), one of the ring’s members, consoles her after her car-dealership encounter, she convinces him to set her up with cards of her own.

Plaza’s whole Wednesday Addams persona, with her flat affect and impatient sarcasm, tends to mask a heart of gold in her characters, but that’s not the case here. Emily may be sympathetic in her desperation, but she’s not nice, and when Youcef, who tells her about a four-unit rental building he’s saving up to buy, starts showing more interest in her, it’s him we worry about. While the New Jersey grate Plaza gives her sentences is only semi-successful, what makes her performance so compelling is how she plays Emily as someone barely able to bring herself to quirk her lips into a smile or make other efforts to disguise her flintiness, even as she realizes that allowing glimpses of her anger just gets her into more trouble. Well, it gets her into more trouble when she’s navigating the white-collar spaces she aspires to, which happen to require more pleasantries and shit-taking than she has a capacity for. In the extralegal underworld she becomes more and more enmeshed in, her intractability and willingness to commit violence turn out to be advantages.

Ford uses handheld camerawork and naturalistic lighting throughout his film and opts for little beauty. Emily’s life is unpretty, made up of industrial kitchens, freeway drives, a shared apartment whose common spaces are often claimed by her roommates, and, once she embarks on her life of crime, big-box stores, parking lots, and the strip-mall back rooms where Youcef and his crew operate. The movie is more politically aware than its protagonist, understanding that the various forces dooming her to financial devastation affect huge swaths of people. “I’m sorry, are you an employee? No, you’re an independent contractor,” Emily’s boss sneers when she complains about her shifts getting punitively cut, a line that would be too on the nose if it weren’t whipped out at countless workplaces circumventing worker protections. Emily moves among immigrants, fellow ex-cons, and people like Youcef who are striving toward some sort of financial legitimacy, even as she moves in the other direction. But she doesn’t show any sense of commonality with them, only fury that she’s been made to join them, which is the film’s most astringent aspect. The recent satire Not Okay got some attention for starting with a jokey warning about its unlikable female character, but Emily the Criminal actually offers that challenge by presenting a heroine who’s been treated unfairly and who’s learned from that only to step on others around her to climb up.

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EMILY THE CRIMINAL

"no honor among thieves".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Title character gets away with crime (others are not so fortunate), and there’s lying, fraud, robbery.

More Detail:

EMILY THE CRIMINAL is about a college art graduate with too many school loans and a dim economic future because of an old felony assault conviction against a former boyfriend, who develops a passion for credit card fraud and the illicit benefits it can bring. Despite its thriller bonafides, EMILY THE CRIMINAL is a character study about the joys and fears of embracing and following your deepest desires, but the story’s female protagonist just happens to be a person who decides that crime is her passion, and the movie also contains lots of strong foul language and other moral issues.

Played by Aubrey Plaza, the title character, Emily, is a college art graduate who works as a delivery person for a restaurant. Saddled with student debt, Emily is unable to get a better job because of an old felony assault conviction.

One day, Emily agrees to do a delivery shift for one of her co-workers, who wants to take his son to a ball game. In return, he gives her a phone number to be a “dummy shopper.” She calls up the number and is asked to attend an orientation the next morning.

Emily finds out the job entails buying expensive goods with stolen credit cards supplied by a handsome, charismatic Lebanese immigrant named Youcef. Emily gets a kick out of engaging in this criminal activity, especially when she manages to turn the tables on two other criminals who try to steal her money stash one night. She also becomes increasingly attracted to Youcef and even meets Youcef’s charming mother. Eventually, they hatch a risky plan to take their illicit business to the next level.

EMILY THE CRIMINAL is a well-acted crime thriller and character study. Because of her student debt, the protagonist, Emily, has abandoned her dreams of doing something with the drawing and painting she learned at college. However, she soon finds herself seduced by the quick cash and illicit thrills of credit card fraud. Then, when her criminal mentor, and new lover, suggests taking their thievery to the next level, Emily’s is excited by his plan. The plan goes awry, however, and Emily makes a suggestion that’s even more dangerous.

The protagonist’s story in EMILY THE CRIMINAL could be said of any person who finds a new passion and decides to embrace it fully, despite the risks involved. The movie’s writer/director says that’s what attracted him to doing this particular story as his first feature length movie. However, Emily’s story is also a story about getting away with crime. EMILY THE CRIMINAL also has lots of strong foul language, a scene where Emily sleeps with her mentor and brief cocaine use at a party Emily attends. It does show, however, that there’s really no honor among thieves. Eventually, for example, Emily leaves her mentor and lover behind to save her own skin.

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New movie from rumored James Bond actor is a must-watch after earning great review score

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is heavily rumored to have been chosen as the next James Bond but before he dons the role of 007, his latest movie, The Fall Guy, is gearing up to race onto our screens and its Rotten Tomatoes score suggests it will be essential viewing.

Taylor-Johnson will star alongside Barbie and Oppenheimer actors Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt as well as Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham in an action comedy that pays tribute to the invaluable work of stunt performers in movies .

What is The Fall Guy about?

Directed by David Leitch (Bullet Train, Deadpool 2 and co-director of John Wick), the movie follows stuntman Colt Seavers (Gosling) who has spent a year away from Hollywood after suffering an almost career-ending accident.

However, Colt is reluctantly drafted in by movie director – and his ex – Jody Moreno (Blunt) when the star of her latest mega-budget blockbuster, Tom Ryder (Taylor-Johnson) goes missing.

As Colt searches for the missing Tom’s whereabouts, he finds himself ensnared in a sinister criminal conspiracy.

The Fall Guy has just had its premiere at the 2024 edition of SXSW and will be exploding into theaters for general audiences on May 3.

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The Fall Guy scores big on Rotten Tomatoes

Following its premiere, The Fall Guy has earned an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes , an impressive review score given the movie’s nature as a popcorn-guzzling action comedy.

It should be noted that the score is based on 34 reviews collated to date and it could change as more reviews come in.

The 88% score means that The Fall Guy is currently the highest-rated movie of Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s career, with his next highest being the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy (80%) and the superhero movie Kick-Ass (77%).

For Emily Blunt, the movie is the ninth highest-rated of her career, with her best-reviewed movie being 2018’s A Quiet Place (96%). Best Picture-winning Oppenheimer currently stands at 93%.

And for Ryan Gosling, The Fall Guy is his joint-sixth high-rated movie alongside Barbie while 2011’s Drive is his best-reviewed film with 93%.

What the critics are saying

With an 88% rating, the majority of reviews for The Fall Guy are largely positive, with a general consensus being that the film is a fun-filled romp that is perfectly accompanied by a giant bucket of popcorn.

Matt Donato of Inverse wrote: “A fun-filled, fun-loving love letter to the undervalued stunt performance profession. It’s full-gear popcorn entertainment that only someone wholly passionate about stunt work could deliver.”

Deadline’s Valerie Complex said: “The Fall Guy stands as a hilarious and thoughtful tribute to the stunt community, blending action with a poignant exploration of the sacrifices made by these unsung heroes.

IGN Movies critic Siddhant Adlakha noted: “It’s wanting in some regards, but for an action-comedy that takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the film industry, its charisma and chemistry are just enough. The Fall Guy might be Gosling’s most accomplished comedic work yet.”

David Fear of Rolling Stone wrote: “The Fall Guy feels indistinguishable from the dozens of other action films. And then Gosling and Blunt start flirting and fighting and verbally feinting with each other, and you feel like you’re floating an inch above your seat.”

And finally, Matthew Jackson of the AV Club called The Fall Guy “a blast of fun at the movies worthy of the biggest tub of popcorn you can find. It’s two hours of movie stars being absolute charm machines, and sometimes that’s all you really need.”

The Fall Guy explodes onto theater screens on May 3, 2024.

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The Fall Guy - Official Trailer 2

Check out the new trailer for The Fall Guy, an upcoming movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. He’s a stuntman, and like everyone in the stunt community, he gets blown up, shot, crashed, thrown through windows and dropped from the highest of heights, all for our entertainment. And now, fresh off an almost career-ending accident, this working-class hero has to track down a missing movie star, solve a conspiracy and try to win back the love of his life while still doing his day job. What could possibly go right?

From real life stunt man and director David Leitch, the blockbuster director of Bullet Train, Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw and the producer of John Wick, Nobody and Violent Night, comes his most personal film yet. A new hilarious, hard-driving, all-star apex-action thriller and love letter to action movies and the hard-working and under-appreciated crew of people who make them: The Fall Guy.

Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling (Barbie, La La Land, Drive) stars as Colt Seavers, a battle-scarred stuntman who, having left the business a year earlier to focus on both his physical and mental health, is drafted back into service when the star of a mega-budget studio movie—being directed by his ex, Jody Moreno, played by Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer, A Quiet Place films, Sicario)—goes missing.

While the film’s ruthless producer (Emmy winner Hannah Waddingham; Ted Lasso), maneuvers to keep the disappearance of star Tom Ryder (Golden Globe winner Aaron Taylor-Johnson; Bullet Train) a secret from the studio and the media, Colt performs the film’s most outrageous stunts while trying (with limited success) to charm his way back into Jody’s good graces. But as the mystery around the missing star deepens, Colt will find himself ensnared in a sinister, criminal plot that will push him to the edge of a fall more dangerous than any stunt.

Inspired by the hit 1980s TV series, The Fall Guy also stars Winston Duke (Black Panther franchise) and Academy Award nominee Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once).

From a screenplay by Hobbs & Shaw screenwriter Drew Pearce, The Fall Guy is produced by Kelly McCormick (Bullet Train, Nobody, Atomic Blonde) and David Leitch for their company 87North, and by Ryan Gosling and by Guymon Casady (Game of Thrones, Steve Jobs and executive producer of the upcoming series Ripley) for Entertainment 360. The film is executive produced by Drew Pearce, Entertainment 360’s Geoff Shaevitz and the creator of the original Fall Guy television series, Glen A. Larson.

The Fall Guy opens in US theaters on May 3, 2024 and in UK cinemas on May 2, 2024.

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Emily the Criminal movie review (2022)
The film plays like a bat out of hell, all adrenaline, similar to the Safdie brothers' recent " Good Time ," although "Emily the Criminal" is more bare-bones and straightforward in its style. The film's view of the "land of opportunity" could not be more cynical. This is John Patton Ford's directorial debut, and it is an extremely impressive ...
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Emily the Criminal is an edge-of-your-seat thriller aimed directly at millennials, replacing the glamor and sexiness prevalent in crime films made by previous generations with an indictment ...
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Emily the Criminal. NYT Critic's Pick. Directed by John Patton Ford. Crime, Drama, Thriller. R. 1h 33m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our ...
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Emily the Criminal Movie Review
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Tue 25 Jan 2022 14.53 EST. Last modified on Tue 18 Oct 2022 04.16 EDT. I t's hard to really blame Emily (Aubrey Plaza) for choosing a life of crime. A low-paid service gig brings nothing but ...
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Our Take: Plaza and first-time feature writer/director John Patton Ford are a potent team. Emily the Criminal gives us a character who's tried and tried and tried to play the capitalism game ...
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Aubrey Plaza in the movie "Emily the Criminal.". Aubrey Plaza knows a thing or two about stealing. With her laserlike glare and killer deadpan timing, she can say absolutely nothing and slyly ...
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Emily is steeped in student debt, with an old conviction on her record preventing her from doing much more than work in food delivery. Happening across an opportunity to make a few hundred in quick money, she initially balks at the idea of breaking the law, but the chance to finally get out from the hole she is in proves too enticing, and desperation fuels a desire for more, taking bigger and ...
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Emily the Criminal is also a star vehicle for one of the industry's biggest risers. Along with starring in the newest season of HBO Max's The White Lotus, Aubrey Plaza has had a busy year. Emily the Criminal is one of the few films in her career that falls solely on her shoulders. It passes if she is effective and fails if she is not.
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