Review: "Profile"

By Ben Miller

New and innovative films inevitably lead to imitators. 2018's Searching is the obvious predecessor to Profile, the new film from Russian filmmaker (and Searching producer) Timur Bekmambetov. While the film ratchets up the tension to almost unbearable levels, script issues and over-dramatic characterizations turn this film into a bloated mess, albeit a watchable one.

Valene Kane stars as Amy Whittaker, a struggling freelance journalist who has an idea for a story: what if she can get recruited by Syrian jihadists in order to discover their tactics? Amy creates a fake Facebook profile and in no time at all, "Melody" is befriended by Bilel (Shazad Latif), a London-born ISIS member living in Syria...

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Review: Searching

by Lynn Lee

At first glance, Searching has all the marks of a conventional “missing child” thriller.  Single dad’s teenage daughter goes awol, leaving signs to fear the worst; police investigation reaches dead end or obviously-wrong conclusion; dad realizes there was too much about his daughter he didn’t know but doggedly solves the mystery on his own after several red herrings and, of course, a shocking twist.  Slightly condensed, the entire film could fit into a one-hour TV crime procedural. As it is, the movie clocks in at a lean, tightly paced 102 minutes and hits all the requisite plot beats with impressive efficiency.

And yet, there is something different about Searching that distinguishes it from other examples of the genre.  Two somethings, actually...

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