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The California Times is committed to reviewing new theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because moviegoing carries inherent risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials. We will continue to note the various ways readers can see each new film, including drive-in theaters in the Southland and VOD/streaming options when available.
“Profile,” based on a journalist’s undercover investigation of an Islamic State recruiter, is inventive, well-acted and one of the most tense movies of the year so far.
British investigative reporter Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane) is writing about the phenomenon of European women and girls being recruited to join Islamic State. She crafts a fake Facebook profile as “Melody Nelson,” a 19-year-old recent convert to Islam, and shares a jihadist’s video. With alarming suddenness, he makes contact with her. What follows is an increasingly taut
Profile is finally due to release on May 14th, 2021, but where will the movie be available to watch? Is Profile on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max?
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The Los Angeles Times is committed to reviewing new theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because moviegoing carries inherent risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials. We will continue to note the various ways readers can see each new film, including drive-in theaters in the Southland and VOD/streaming options when available.
“Profile,” based on a journalist’s undercover investigation of an Islamic State recruiter, is inventive, well-acted and one of the most tense movies of the year so far.
British investigative reporter Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane) is writing about the phenomenon of European women and girls being recruited to join Islamic State. She crafts a fake Facebook profile as “Melody Nelson,” a 19-year-old recent convert to Islam, and shares a jihadist’s video. With alarming suddenness, he makes contact with her. What follows is an increasingly taut
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. (He has also directed several installments in Russia’s most successful live-action film franchise, a series of holiday-themed comedies unreleased in the U.S.) As a producer, though, Bekmambetov is more innovative. He’s a low-key pioneer, running thriller plots on a new operating system with his so-called “Screenlife” movies.
These projects, like
and
Searching, tell their stories entirely through computer screens, an extension of the first-person effect seen in found-footage horror. Watching a missing-persons case or a vengeful ghost story unfold through streaming video, chat boxes, and search results isn’t necessarily a more “realistic” window into genre filmmaking; like found footage, it requires different forms of contrivance in pursuit of a particular effect. But the surprisingly successful technique has a way of teasing out subtleties of behavior not available to traditional narrative, and immersing audiences in familiar online
Starring Valene Kane, Shazad Latif, Christine Adams, Amir Rahimzadeh, Morgan Watkins, Emma Cater
Published May 12, 2021
7Timur Bekmambetov has a vision that telling stories purely through a computer desktop will be the norm in cinema one day. He s dubbed it the screen life genre and previously produced
Searching, two movies that have enjoyed decent success using this method of storytelling. The desktop film has been disregarded by some as a gimmick and lauded by others for being unique and modern – but ultimately, like any genre, it comes down to the director s execution.
For Bekmambetov s first directing effort in this genre, he chose to tell the true story of a journalist, Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane), who goes undercover online as a recent convert to Islam to investigate the recruitment efforts of ISIS, particularly for young European women. Under the fake online profile of Melody, Amy attracts the attention of a senior member of ISIS, Bilel (played perfectly by Shazad Lat