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MOVIE REVIEW by Richard Roeper PROFILE Two stars Amy ... Valene Kane Matt .. Morgan Watkins Bilel ... Shazad Latif
Focus Features presents a film directed by Timur Bekmambetov and written by Bekmambetov, Britt Poulton and Olga Kharina. Rated R (for language throughout and some disturbing images). Running time: 105 minutes. Opens Thursday in theaters.
Mainstream movies and TV shows told through computer screens have been a thing for a number of years now, most often in horror films such as The Den (2013) and Unfriended (2014), though arguably the most innovative and effective use of the technique was the Connection Lost episode of Modern Family in 2015, which is told through Julie Bowen s Claire via her laptop screen as she waits for her connecting flight at O Hare Airport. (One running bit had Cameron continually asking if Claire had remembered to pick up a tin of Garrett s cheese and caramel popcorn for him.)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), an undercover British journalist investigating the recruitment of young European women by ISIS and is on a quest to bait and expose a terrorist recruiter through social media. In order to investigate the recruitment of young European women by ISIS, Amy creates an online persona of a woman via a new Facebook profile under the alias of Melody Nelson, a young Londoner who has recently converted to Islam.
She is quickly contacted by Abu Bilel al-Britani (
Shazad Latif,
Star Trek: Discovery), and the two begin talking through Skype. These chats quickly turn into a courtship as Bilel tries to seduce young “Melody” and talk her into journeying to Syria to become his wife and join the jihadist cause. Amy’s obsession with this story takes a heavy toll, not only on her personal life, but on her health and even her perception of reality, and she finds herself developing romantic feelings for Bilel.
âProfileâ is the terrorist thriller as IT session
By Mark Feeney Globe Staff,Updated May 12, 2021, 11:57 a.m.
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Valene Kane in Profile. Courtesy of BAZELEVS and Focus Features
âProfileâ is based on a true story, from 2014, about an English reporter who masqueraded online as a Muslim convert to infiltrate ISIS. Thatâs straightforward enough.
Whatâs even more straightforward â except that at the same time it isnât at all straightforward â is how the film plays out. âProfileâ consists entirely of screen shots: Skype and FaceTime calls, Facebook messaging, the reporterâs desktop, Google searches, even, yes, a few cat videos (the demands of Web verisimilitude must be met). This is straightforward, because thatâs how the events happened: virtually. Itâs not straightforward, because seeing only small screens on a big screen is not how movies are normally viewed: cinematically.