Emily the Criminal (2022)

Jack and I loved this nail-biter in which Aubrey Plaza, in the title role, joins a group of scammers in order to pay off her student debt and gets deeper and deeper into fraud. With Theo Rossi as her recruiter and Gina Gershon in a cameo, it kept us on the figurative edges of our seats the whole time. Emily is a bad-ass and fun to watch.

This is the feature debut of director/writer John Patton Ford, made after one short film in 2010. Student debt was one of the reasons it took him so long to get back to movies.

Composer Nathan Halpern has dozens of score credits and several albums to his name, but the album isn't available to stream. I did find about 4½ exciting minutes on YouTube. And here's a list of some of the songs.

Plaza was last blogged for Spin Me Round and Gershon for Killer Joe. Although Rossi and Halpern have dozens of credits, they're not familiar to me.

This movie is racking up lots of wins and nominations, including for the Spirit Awards first feature, first screenplay, best lead for Plaza, and best supporting for Rossi (the Independent Feature Project Spirit Awards no longer divides the acting categories by gender); Directors Guild best first feature; National Board of Review Top Ten Independent Films, and more.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics' average is a righteous 94%, while its audiences' 79 is slightly crooked.

We rented it on January 3, but it's now available on Netflix with a subscription.