Emily the Criminal

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.

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.

Emily is Plaza’s Michael Corleone, a character who erodes your sympathies so slowly that you almost don’t notice what’s becoming of her — or perhaps, what she always was.

As a crime thriller, Emily the Criminal is well-written and absorbingly paced, but it’s Plaza’s fearless work that makes it memorable.

Much of the film’s success comes down to Plaza, who has left that deadpan sphinxlike mode of hers some way back in the rear-view mirror.

The glower of actor Aubrey Plaza is a thing of great beauty and precision, as subtle as a stiletto secretly sheathed in a kicky pair of boots.

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

Plaza is an indie cinema screen magnet&#59; saying that she killed this role isn’t something that causes shock.

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

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.