Emily the Criminal (2022)

Aubrey Plaza plays Emily Benetto, a Los Angeles delivery contractor with a felony record and a student loan balance that functions as a second antagonist. The film opens on a job interview that curdles into humiliation and an unpaid internship offer, and it never quite recovers its composure. What follows is a credit card fraud apprenticeship, a mentor named Youcef, a storage unit full of stolen merchandise, and a slow slide into violence that the film observes with the calm of a claims adjuster. It is a crime thriller built on a labor-market grievance, and it does not pretend otherwise. The felony on Emily's record is not a moral failing to be redeemed. It is a hiring filter, and the movie treats it as such.

The social consciousness here is economic and structural, dramatized through spreadsheets, debt collectors, and the specific indignity of being told an entry-level position will not pay you. Emily walks out of that internship, and the film's sympathies are unambiguous. The critique is of precarity itself: gig work without benefits, employers who extract labor and vanish, a cousin named Khalil who cuts his own partner out of the take. None of this arrives as a speech. The characters simply behave the way people behave when rent is due. The casting is diverse in an unremarkable way, which is to say the ensemble looks like the actual city, and the film makes no announcement about it. Emily is a woman who steals and lies and abandons a wounded man in a car, and the movie declines to soften her into a role model.

The remaining categories are largely unoccupied. No romantic or identity politics beyond a brief affair, no environmental themes, no commentary on bodies or brains, no historical revisionism to speak of. This is a lean, conventional genre piece with an unusually bitter economic spine, and it earned four Independent Spirit nominations for its trouble. We classify it as a crime drama with a grudge, and we move on.