Review Excerpts
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 "unlikeable" 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.
-- Sheila O'Malley, Roger Ebert
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.
-- Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times
It's a genre movie with its feet firmly on the ground, small in scale and tight in focus ... 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.
Benjamin Lee, The Guardian.
-- Sheila O'Malley, Roger Ebert
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.
-- Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times
It's a genre movie with its feet firmly on the ground, small in scale and tight in focus ... 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.
Benjamin Lee, The Guardian.
- lobotomychic
- Dec 15, 2022