James R | On 31, Oct 2020

MUBI is getting into the spooky spirit this week, with Wes Craven’s classic The Hills Have Eyes joinin Malgorzata Szumowska’s debut, the folk horror The Other Lamb. But there are atmospheric offerings aplenty elsewhere, from the intense, unsettling The Skin I Live In to Carol Morley’s dreamlike The Falling. Going into November, there’s insight into American history as the country goes to the polls and a chance to catch one of Roy Andersson’s idiosyncratic offerings.

For those wanting something on the big screen this weekend, MUBI Go is offering a free cinema ticket to see Mogul Mowgli at participating UK cinemas.

And, of course, there’s MUBI Library to peruse. With more than 400 former releases now available to stream at any time, read our full guide to how it works here – or our list of recommended starting points for browsing.

What’s new, coming soon and leaving soon on the subscription service? This is your weekly MUBI Digest:

 

This week on MUBI

The Hills Have Eyes – 31st October

In Wes Craven’s cult horror hit, a family on vacation are attacked by mutant killers in the desert. After the success of Last House on the Left, Craven served up another terrifying tale of family survival with a still-relevant Vietnam-era moral question at its core: which family deserves to live? The normal American family? Or the inbred cannibals damaged by nuclear testing designed to keep “upstanding” families safe?

Almodóvar: I’m So Excited – 1st November

Full Moon in Paris – 2nd November

Fed up with the suburbs and her sweet, steady boyfriend, young interior decorator Louise independently decides to take a pied-à-terre apartment in Paris where she can sample the single life, which includes dealing with the come-ons of her indefatigable friend, Octave. French New Wave director Éric Rohmer combines the energy of 1980s Paris with a fizzing tale of a young woman’s liberation.

Profit Motive and The Whispering Wind – 3rd November

A tour of the United States’ progressive history, loosely inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, visiting the resting places of such famed figures as Malcolm X, Susan B. Anthony and Crazy Horse, alongside sites of pivotal struggles, such as the 1770 Boston Massacre.

Entire Days Together – 4th November

A young girl is cured of her epilepsy just as summer vacation is about to begin. She spends her last days with her classmates, and goes on a last school trip: a picnic, a game of hide-and-seek, and a river. During this period, she’ll come to experience life in a new way.

You the Living – 5th November

Made up of 50 criss-crossing vignettes and populated with dozens of characters, Roy Andersson’s 2007 compendium is a unique journey through our permanently askew universe, in all its humor and heartbreak.

Huppert: 8 Women – 6th November

Eight women at a country estate suspect each of foul play after the house’s owner, Marcel, is found murdered in Francois Ozon’s 2002 comedy. The telephone line has been cut, the car won’t start and a heavy snowfall keeps the women confined to the grounds – including Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart and the inimitable Isabelle Huppert.

 

Other new releases on MUBI

The Other Lamb

The members of the Flock, all women and female children, live in a rural compound, being led by a man, Shepherd. Selah, a daughter, is given the great honor of participating in the sacred ritual of the birthing of the lambs where she has a shocking and otherworldly experience.

What We Do in the Shadows

Taiki Waititi’s vampire comedy is moving, clever and mercilessly quick, but most of all, it’s bleeding funny.

Pauline at the Beach

Marion is about to divorce from her husband and takes her 15-year-old niece Pauline on a vacation to Normandy. There, the two navigate the men around them. Marion runs into her old flame Pierre and attempts to set him up with Pauline, while she starts a liaison with middle-aged Henri.

Now, at Last!

A sloth crawls up a branch at its own leisure and takes a nap, hanging on its head and with its long claws firmly planted in the rough bark. Time is suspended as each breath, every movement becomes a theatrical drama unfolding before our eyes.

The Voice of the Moon

Ivo Salvini has recently been released from a mental hospital and is in love with Aldini. As he attempts to win her heart, he wanders a strange, dreamlike landscape in his Emilian village and encounters various oddball characters, including Gonnella, a paranoid old man prone to conspiracy theories.

Creepy

A year after a botched hostage negotiation with a serial killer turned deadly, ex-detective Koichi and his wife move into a new house with a deeply strange new neighbor. His old cop colleagues come calling for his help on a mysterious case, which may be related to the strange goings-on next door.

The Young Observant

A fourteen-year-old boy’s life in the mountains is about to end as he is soon to enroll in catering school. The institution he attends is renowned for its strict rules: the lessons on cooking, dining etiquette, and religion make each student daily confront their weaknesses, insecurities and skills.

The Falling

This funny, shocking coming-of-age paranormal musical is entrancing cinema.

Almodóvar: The Skin I Live In – 18th October

The Skin I Live In is a sultry, unsettling masterpiece that sees Almodóvar at his most audacious.

Finding Vivian Maier

Part detective story and part portrait of an artist, this documentary about the now-celebrated photographer is a fascinating watch.

Beautiful New Bay Area Project

While inspecting a wharf, young Amano, president of an urban planning company, meets beautiful laborer Takako and falls in love at first sight. However, she does not return his affections, so he steals her ID card and goes on the run from the infuriated Takako. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s martial arts flick has a sense of realism that is as unusual as it is bracing.

Ghost Strata

Ghost Strata refers to the missing elements from within the rock strata that offer hints of what was once there. Charting personal movements of the filmmaker in various places, the film explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and future.

Malina

Set in Vienna, film charts a female writer’s passage to self-destruction as she is torn between two lovers, one of whom is her husband. Isabelle Huppert stars in Werner Schroeter’s adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel, co-written by Elfriede Jelinek (The Piano Teacher).

Wuthering Heights (2011)

Rarely has a period tale felt so modern.

A Good Marriage

From New Wave master Eric Rohmer comes A Good Marriage, the second film in his “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Taking as its inspiration La Fontaine’s proverb “Who has not built castles in Spain?”, this heartwarming dramedy watches a romantically dissatisfied young woman try to plot out love.

Blue Boy

By watching sex workers listen to their own experiences while staring at us, Blue Boy creates a provocative triangle of power relations between camera, subject, and spectator. Manuel Abramovich plunges us into the complexities of sex trade with an inventive, superbly effective storytelling device.

Two/One

Do you ever feel like there’s somebody out there, on the other side of the world, who feels how you feel? Kaden is a world-class ski jumper in Canada, pining for a lost love. Khai is a corporate executive in Shanghai, drawn to a new coworker with a secret. The two men go about their lives, without knowing that they are connected.

Journey to the Shore

Though best known for J-horror, Kiyoshi Kurosawa confirms his remarkable versatility with this genre-bending road movie that paints an otherworldly portrait of love and death. Melding romance with the supernatural, Journey to the Shore is full of moments of surprising tenderness and melancholy.

The Deer Hunter

A classic of New Hollywood cinema, Michael Cimino’s powerful anti-war epic summons a trio of intense, terrific performances from its stars Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep. Cimino’s breakthrough, and winner of five Academy Awards including Best Picture.

South Terminal

The latest film by Algerian-French auteur Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche is an engrossing drama tinged with a thriller’s suspense. Echoing Casablanca’s hero fighting to keep wartime neutrality and Transit’s clever use of an unnamed locale, Ameur-Zaïmeche tells a timeless story of paramount urgency.

The Aviator’s Wife

Based on the proverb that it’s impossible to think of nothing, this detective story reveals what happens when doubts mix with romance, and the magic that is created by the imagination.

Kaurismäki: The Other Side of Hope

Khaled arrives at the port of Helsinki concealed in a coal container, fleeing Syria to seek asylum in Finland. There he crosses paths with Wikström, a former salesman who has recently began a new life as a restaurateur. Together they navigate the adversities they face in these unfamiliar new worlds.

The New Girlfriend

Romain Duris is superb in Francois Ozon’s witty, stylish exploration of gender and identity.

Gay USA

Filmed in one day, June 26, 1977, in multiple locations across the USA, this film documents the gay pride parades of the time and also offers an overview of the issues facing the gay community, as a myriad of different camera operators and interviewers took to the streets.

End of Summer (2014)

End of Summer captures a journey to the southernmost corner of the world to discover the calm scenery of a landscape changing seasons, barely influenced or even noticed by humanity. Filmed through a waning Antarctic summer, the film is a series of mainly static tableaux made over a 20-day period.

Cure

A wave of gruesome murders is sweeping Tokyo. The only connection is a bloody X carved into the neck of each of the victims. In each case, the murderer is found near the victim and remembers nothing of the crime. MUBI begins a season looking at the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa with this 1997 horror thriller.

Exclusive: The Ground Beneath My Feet

Lola is a high achiever at a demanding job, despite the secrets she keeps from her colleagues—an affair with her boss Elise, and the needs of her paranoid schizophrenic sister, for whom Lola acts as guardian. When her sister’s instability intensifies, Lola finds her grasp on reality weakening.

Salon Kitty

Berlin, 1939: SS officer Wallenberg is ordered to find Germany’s most beautiful women to work in the opulent brothel of Madam Kitty, while Wallenberg secretly records their acts for blackmail. When a young prostitute uncovers the conspiracy, her revenge ignites a plot of pain and perversion.

Sivas

A young boy, Aslan, finds a weathered fighting dog, Sivas, wounded in a ditch. Upset over losing the main role in a school play, Aslan turns to dog fighting to impress his crush. As Sivas proves successful at the fighting ground, Aslan soaks up the adrenaline yet remains uneasy with the violence in this 2014 Turkish drama.

Bird Island

After a long period of isolation, Antonin, a young man with persistent fatigue, rediscovers the world in a care center for wild birds. In this strange setting, lulled by the din of the planes, one saves both wounded birds and souls in pain.

Naomi Kawase: Sweet Bean

From Naomi Kawase comes this feel-good tale of friendship between people running a bakery that implores us to remember the simple pleasures in life.

Strasbourg 1518

After recently showcasing Jonathan Glazer’s new short, The Fall, MUBI presents his lockdown offering. Uniting some of today’s greatest dancers, and powered by Mica Levi’s hypnotic score, Strasbourg 1518 compellingly plays on the restless nature of our recent times.

Wind (1996)

Taking inspiration from The Three Women, a 1951 photo by Lucien Hervé, Marcell Ivanyi’s short asks what might lie outside the frame. This 360 degrees exploration of a scene imagined occurs in the remote countryside, where three women witness an unsettling event.

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words

Whether headlining films in Sweden, Italy, or Hollywood, Ingrid Bergman always pierced the screen with a singular soulfulness. This documentary allows us access to her world, culling from the most personal of archival materials, including letters, home movies, but also interviews with her children.

The Lighthouse (2006)

Set on the fringes of an unspecified war, Lena returns home from Moscow to her mountain village in the Caucasus to try to persuade her grandparents to leave.

Exclusive: In My Room

Right after its Venice world premiere, this new short by Mati Diop gets an exclusive MUBI release. Shot in her Paris studio during lockdown and based on recordings of her grandmother, Diop creates a melodramatic home movie that playfully blends themes of womanhood, transmission, and freedom.

Space Dogs

The golden age of the Soviet space programme is full of cosmic brutality, also towards man’s best friend. The most famous of them all is the street dog Laika, who according to local legends is still roaming the streets of Moscow like a ghost to forever remind us of the horrors of animal testing…

Huppert: Time of the Wolf

The time preceding the apocalypse is known in Germanic mythology as the time of the wolves. Fleeing a disaster, a middle-class family travel to their countryside holiday home, believing themselves to be escaping the consequences of the general state of chaos, but they find it occupied by strangers. After working with Michael Haneke on The Piano Teacher, Isabelle Huppert teamed up again with the director for this tale of post-apocalyptic survival.

Huppert: Amateur

An ex-nun who writes adult short stories crosses paths with an amnesiac wandering the streets of New York City. When they set out to uncover his identity, they come face to face with his unsavory past, including a vengeful porno actress and ruthless corporate assassins hot on their trail.

Huppert: Valley of Love

An estranged couple meet for the first time in years in the Death Valley. They are here to answer to an invitation from their son Michael, which they received after his suicide, six months ago. Despite the absurdity of the situation, they decide to follow the initiatory program designed by Michael. Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu star in Guillaume Nicloux’s intense, intimate drama.

Huppert: Home

A family’s peaceful existence is threatened when a busy highway is opened right next to their isolated property in Ursula Meier’s 2008 drama. As the sounds and fumes of the modern world begin to fill their home, the family becomes disorientated, and each of its member finds themselves pushed to dangerous extremes.

Naomi Kawase: Still the Water

On the Japanese island of Amami, despite lacking parental guidance, 16-year-old Kaito and his girlfriend Kyoko try to find their place in the world. While Kaito suffers from the absence of his father, who moved to Tokyo after his birth, Kyoko must come to grips with her mother’s terminal illness.

Naomi Kawase: The Mourning Forest

MUBI’s triple bill of films by Naomi Kawase kicks off with this gentle yet wholly absorbing look at the passage through grief and the bonds that unite us.

Marguerite Duras: Baxter, Vera Baxter

Opening MUBI’s focus on Marguerite Duras’ hypnotic cinema is her radical, enclosed melodrama with Delphine Seyrig and Gérard Depardieu.

Marguerite Duras: India Song

The wife of a disgraced French diplomat suffers from a “leprosy of the soul,” another term for ennui. Through a mélange of off-screen gossip, we learn of Anne-Marie’s scandalous conduct in 1930s India and her eventual fate, engendered by boredom, colonial guilt, and a string of meaningless affairs. Currently available to rent

Exclusive: Matthias & Maxime

Xavier Dolan’s latest follows Matt and Max, two childhood best friends, are asked to share a kiss for the purposes of a student short film. Soon, a lingering doubt sets in, confronting both of them with their preferences, threatening the brotherhood of their social circle, and, eventually, changing their lives.

Apiyemiyeki

This cinematographic portrait originates in 3,000 drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari, a people native to the Brazilian Amazon. The drawings are animated onto landscapes and sights, serving as a visual memory of the violent attacks they were submitted to during Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Almodóvar: All About My Mother

Following the tragic death of her teenage son, Manuela travels from Madrid to Barcelona in an attempt to contact the long-estranged father the boy never knew. She reunites with an old friend, an outspoken transgender sex worker, and befriends a troubled actress and a pregnant, HIV-positive nun.

Almodóvar: Broken Embraces

Pedro and Penélope Cruz reunite as the man and his muse bring us a slow-burning, sensual tale of a director and an actress who fall in love. The news of powerful businessman Ernesto Martel’s death forces Harry Caine, a blind man who was once a film writer and director, to confront his tragic past. Magdalena was the star of Harry’s last film. Although she was Martel’s younger girlfriend at the time, the two fell ferociously in love.

Almodóvar: Volver

In working-class Madrid, Raimunda needs to deal with her husband’s death, while struggling to support her family. But surrounded by three generations of women—her sister Sole, her daughter Paula, and friend Agustina—and haunted by her dead mother, Raimunda will do more than survive.

Almodóvar: Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Hot off the major success of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar switched gears to take his melodramatic style into more dangerous territory – accompanied by by a score from the late, great Ennio Morricone.

Almodóvar: Live Flesh

Víctor falls hard for Elena, but she doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. She does, however, have feelings for David, a policeman who arrives to break up an argument between her and Víctor. That encounter however takes an unexpected turn that leads these characters down a dark, twisty path in Almodóvar’s 1997 drama.

Almodóvar: Bad Education

Two boys, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, fear, and abuse in a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s. Father Manolo, the headmaster, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three meet again many years later, and their past actions and new lives intertwine in creative and destructive ways.

Almodóvar: Talk to Her

Benigno is infatuated with Alicia, a dancer he watches from the anonymity of his apartment. After an accident, she is brought to the hospital where Benigno happens to be her caregiver. When wounded bullfighter Lydia is brought into the same ward, her companion, Marco, bonds with Benigno in the most unexpected, moving, disturbing ways.

Selma

David Oyelowo is unrecognisable in Ava DuVernay’s stirring, powerful biopic of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

From 1967 to 1975, fuelled by curiosity and naïveté, Swedish journalists traversed the ocean to film the black power movement in America. The Black Power Mixtape mobilises a mosaic of images, music, and narration to chronicle the movement’s evolution. This eye-opening documentary was rediscovered 30 years later. Though told from an outsider perspective, this is a revelatory portrait of American systemic racism that remains of the utmost relevance today. Essential.

Showgirls

Paul Verhoeven’s sleazy showbiz drama about a dancer trying to make it in Vegas is terrible or brilliant, depending on who you ask – or is it both?

 

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Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon

The Deer Hunter
Available until 2nd November

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