The Weekly MUBI Digest | 2nd March 2019
David Farnor | On 02, Mar 2019
With International Women’s Day this week, MUBI is all too aptly paying tribute to one of Britain’s best, with a double of Sally Potter’s films. That kicks off a week that’s as diverse as ever, ranging from a celebration of Wim Wenders to a spotlight on young Polish director Olga Chajdas. And, for those seeking something powerful on the big screen, you can use MUBI Go (which offers a free cinema ticket every week to its subscribers) to see Sauvage at participating cinemas.
What’s new, coming soon and leaving soon on the subscription service? This is your weekly MUBI Digest:
This week on MUBI
Sally Potter: Orlando – 2nd March
This adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel is the tale of the young aristocrat Orlando, who begins an epic quest for love and freedom in the court of Elizabeth I as a man, and completes the search 400 years later as a woman, shaking off their biological and cultural destiny along the way.
Sally Potter: Ginger and Rosa – 3rd March
Elle Fanning and Alice Englert deliver starmaking turns in Sally Potter’s coming-of-age drama. It’s 1962. Britain is in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that fear mixes with a growing self-awareness that sends young Ginger (Fanning), whose best friend (Englert) becomes the object of her father’s affections, into a tailspin of swiftly fleeting innocence.
Kazuhiroo Soda: Inland Sea – 4th March
Forsaken by the era of modernization of post-war Japan, Ushimado is rapidly aging and declining. Its rich, ancient culture and the tightknit community are also on the verge of disappearing. This documentary poetically depicts the twilight days of a village and its people by the dreamlike Inland Sea.
Exclusive: Nina – 5th March
Nina and Wojtek are a couple in a stagnant marriage, desperate to conceive a child. When they randomly meet Magda, Wojtek believes they may have found a suitable surrogate mother. However, the fiercely independent Magda awakens a repressed desire in Nina, causing events to spiral out of control.
Wim Wenders: Lisbon Story – 7th March
MUBI’s Wim Wenders retrospective concludes with the tale of a German sound engineer, played by Wenders’ habitué Rüdiger Vogler, embarking on aimless travels around Lisbon. A self-referential musing about cinema and the (difficult) art of filmmaking—including a monologue by Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.
Other new releases on MUBI
Awards 2019: 21 Grams
Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s follow-up to 21 Grams follows three people whose lives and fate come together in a car crash. Academic Paul suffers from a fatal heart disease and is waiting for a transplant; Christina, a former drug addict, now leads a calm life with husband and children; Jack, a hot tempered ex-con, seeks redemption in religion. Both Both Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro received deserved Oscar nominations for their roles.
Awards 2019: A Separation
Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, this hard-hitting Iranian film follows a middle-class couple (Nader and Simin) who decide to divorce. But that simple idea, summed up in the deceptively short title, has ramifications that spread throughout society. Read our full review
Awards 2019: Winter’s Bone
Jennifer Lawrence delivers a star-making performance in this mystery, which sees a determined Ozark Mountain girl go on a dangerous search for her drug-dealing father, who has skipped bail. Cold and bleak, with a cracking supporting turn from John Hawkes, this is a frostbitten pleasure. Read our full review
Awards 2019: Foxcatcher
Channing Tatum delivers a knock-out performance as real life wrestler Mark Schultz, who is taken under the wing of Steve Carrell’s eccentric millionaire, John du Pont. Supported by Mark Ruffalo as Mark’s generous older brather, director Bennett Miller captures the shifting power balance of the trio with a chilling detachment. Read our full review
Awards 2019: Fish Tank
This 2009 film sees 15 year old Mia get a little too close to her mum’s boyfriend (Michael Fassbender). Shot in an apartment block with a raw immediacy, it won the Jury Prize at Cannes – announcing Andrea Arnold as one of Britain’s most exciting filmmakers. A free-wheeling, intimate drama that captures the claustrophobia of council flat living, and (like many of Arnold’s films) captures the rolling Essex landscape with the shadow and colour of a Constable painting. Superb. Read our full review
Awards 2019: The Virgin Spring
Christians Töre and Märeta send their daughter, the virginal Karin, and their foster daughter Ingeri, to deliver candles to a church. On the way, the girls meet three goat herders who brutally rape and murder Karin. When the killers seek refuge in their family’s farm, Töre plots a fitting revenge.
Awards 2019: Beasts of the Southern Wild
Magical realism writ large, Beasts of the Southern is a gorgeous, sad depiction of a child’s view of the world, featuring a star-making turn from Quvenzhané Wallis. Read our full review
Awards 2019: A Foreign Affair
Congresswoman Phoebe Frost travels to postwar Berlin to investigate reports that an American officer may be protecting cabaret singer Erika von Schlütow, the former mistress of a leading Nazi. Miss Frost falls for her military escort Captain Pringle, unaware that he is in fact the singer’s paramour.
Berlinale: Hotel Dallas
1980s Romania. The TV show Dallas becomes a huge hit and inspires a young woman to immigrate to America. Playfully mixing fiction and documentary, Hotel Dallas is a surreal parable of communism, capitalism, and the power of art.
Berlinale: Brothers of the Night
Soft boys by day, kings by night. The film follows young Bulgarian Roma who come to Vienna looking for freedom and a quick buck. They sell their bodies as if that’s all they had. What comforts them, so far from home, is the feeling of being together. But the nights are long and unpredictable.
Berlinale: Victory Day
Every year, on the 9th of May, people gather in Treptower Park in Berlin. They come dressed in their best outfits or in Soviet military uniform. They carry flags, banners and posters, they sing, dance and drink. They celebrate the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany.
Berlinale: Pendular
A couple composed of a male sculptor and a female dancer split their empty loft with a strip of orange tape to mark their respective working space, a divide which changes the nature of their relationship. Gradually the young artists’ works bleed together and inspire one another.
Submarine
Richard Ayoade’s gently hilarious coming-of-age story is quality naval gazing cinema.
Wim Wenders: Paris, Texas
Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother in Los Angeles, and his missing wife.
Wim Wenders: Notebook on Cities and Clothes
Commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou to make a film about the relationship between fashion and cinema, Wenders chose the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto as his subject. The film is an inquiry into Wenders’s mutable language of cinema and Yamamoto’s mutable language of fashion.
Wim Wenders: Tokyo-Ga
German director Wim Wenders travels to Japan to explore the world of one his “masters” in cinema, Japanese celebrated film director Yasujiro Ozu. Sequences of Wenders’ view of Japan alternates with encounters and interviews with crew and cast-members of Ozu’s films.
Bright Future
Starting in sex and thrills straight-to-video, Kiyoshi Kurosawa worked his way out of making smut to forge a style equal parts chilly art-house and pulp genre. Pulse may be his best known film, but this lovely, lonely drama of fathers and sons secured his first slot in the Cannes competition.
Suite Française
France, 1940. Lucile, the wife of a prisoner of war, leads an existence closely watched over by her mother-in-law. When the German army arrives in their village, they are forced to take in Lieutenant von Falk. Lucile tries to avoid him, but is soon unable to ignore her attraction for German officer.
Hong Sang-soo: Claire’s Camera
Film sales assistant Man-hee is working in Cannes but is abruptly fired halfway through the festival. Now unmoored, she strikes up a friendship with Claire, a French teacher and first-time visitor to the festival. By chance, Claire also becomes friends with Man-hee’s boss and Korean filmmaker So.
Hong Sang-soo: The Day After
Areum is looking forward to her first day of work at a small publishing house, unaware that she’s replacing the boss’s lover who recently left him. She is therefore caught off-guard when the boss’s wife causes a scene in the belief that Areum was to be the recipient of a love letter.
byNWR: The Maidens of Fetish Street
This “experimental grindhouse” film by director Saul Resnick is a series of kinky vignettes centered around a lonely, wandering soul, purportedly set in a 1928 Los Angeles infused with 1960s S&M iconography.
“With the original negative long ago destroyed, a world-wide search was conducted for all existing print materials of this rare title. With the help of collectors and archivists, byNWR created the most complete version of the film seen in decades and restored it to its original glory.” –NWR
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Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon
Satan in High Heels
Available until end of: 2nd March
Tyrannosaur
Available until end of: 3rd March
Children of Men
Available until end of: 4th March
Black Sun
Available until end of: 5th March
La Libertad
Available until end of: 6th March
n the Beach at Night Alone
Available until end of: 7th March
Hotel Dallas
Available until end of: 8th March
Central Airport THF
Available until end of: 9th March
Paris, Texas
Available until end of: 10th March