Film Shorts // May 19-25, 2021
OPENING
Counter Column (PG-13) This Christian drama is about a drug dealer (Chris Gonzales) who tries to escape his life by joining the army. Also with Nathan-Andrew Hight, Michael Kaiser, Zane Castor, Ella Haslett, Madeleine Martinez, Diego Medina, and Lars Nielsen. (Opens Friday at Movie Tavern Hulen)
The Dry (R) Eric Bana stars in this thriller as a federal agent who returns to his drought-stricken hometown for a funeral and has to reckon with a decades-old unsolved murder. Also with Genevieve O’Reilly, Keir O’Donnell, John Polson, Julia Blake, Bruce Spence, and William Zappa. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Inane film Profile is mothballed 1998 iMac
dailycal.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailycal.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Internet culture moves at warp speed, with microscopic trend generations and a hyper-specific aesthetic timeline, but Mainstream is unmoored from any particular era besides loose late-2010s. It’s adrift in the uncanny valley of films about the internet, boiling down an entire world of experience – parasocial relationships with influencers, the relentless hustle of building a following, the corrosive surreality of living for faceless likes – into a simple, pedantic message of social media: vacuous, vapid, bad.
Mainstream falls flat, in part, because it’s just not a good movie. But it also speaks to a larger difficulty of accurately capturing our screen lives, social or otherwise, on film. Since The Social Network in 2010, arguably still the most prominent film about social media (although it’s far less about one’s experience on early Facebook than one of the most expensive friendship breakups of all time, also co-starring Garfield), plenty of films and TV episodes have in
âProfile,â based on a journalistâs 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 âMelody Nelson,â a 19-year-old recent convert to Islam, and shares a jihadistâs video. With alarming suddenness, he makes contact with her. What follows is an increasingly taut game of deception with life-or-death stakes as the recruiter, Abu Bilel Al-Britani (Shazad Latif), insists on video chatting with her and digs into her background over dozens of daily conversations â and the lines between professional and personal blur.
Don t have an account?Create account
This content is only available to USA TODAY subscribers.
Subscribe for as low as $4.99 per month.
Subscribe Now
Exclusive, subscriber-only content and weekly email newsletter
Our most popular newsletter, Daily Briefing, to keep you updated on the day s top stories
Full access on your desktop, tablet and mobile device
The eNewspaper, a digital replica of the print edition
Original reporting that provides diverse perspectives on news and issues of today
We know you have many choices and appreciate you investing in us and the future of journalism.
vimarsana © 2020. All Rights Reserved.