New releases and coming soon to MUBI UK (26th August 2017)
David Farnor | On 26, Aug 2017
This week, MUBI releases its latest exclusive acquisition in cinemas: Mimosas. Oliver Laxe’s visually stunning, transcendent western follows a band of travellers across the Moroccan desert to bury an elderly sheikh. While that will arrive on MUBI to stream next month, this is more than enough to keep streamers busy.
What’s new, coming soon and leaving soon on the subscription streaming service? This is your weekly MUBI Digest:
This week on MUBI
Layla Fourie – 26th August
MUBI’s second film by Pia Marais finds the director returning to the country of her birth, South Africa. It’s another intimate character study like At Ellen’s Age, but this time doubly charged by the unique social and racial tensions of the new setting. The result, unexpectedly, is a thriller.
About Twelve – 28th August
A defiantly unsentimental rendition of the all too familiar coming-of-age scenario, Martín Shanly’s debut film sheds light on the many complications that await at the gates of adolescence. As with the rest of the Argentine New Wave, this is crafted with an entirely unique ecstasy for the cinema.
Damiana Kryygi – 29th August
MUBI closes its New Argentine Cinema series with a work at once apart from the films which precede it while also sharing similar political ambitions. This polemic on colonialism and its many victims honours the titular Damiana Kryygi, a young girl who suffered a tragic fate at the hands of settlers.
Love Torn in A Dream – 31st August
Raúl Ruiz on inventive top form, including narrative games about making a feature about pirates; old religious opinions; retired nuns who run a brothel.
Other new releases on MUBI
In a World…
Lake Bell’s writing and directing debut is a brilliant indie gem set in the tough world of voiceovers.
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon
Eric Rohmer’s swansong is a tale of longing and cross-dressing in the 17th century, which follows a young shepherd, Céladon, who is being rebuked by his fiancée, Astrée, who suspects that he is cheating on her. Through utter desperation he throws himself into a roaring torrent river sweeps him away… Eric Rohmer’s vision of doubt, hazard and love.
Castro
MUBI’s New Argentine Cinema season continues with an Alejo Moguillasky triple-bill. This cockeyed semi-comedy’s unlikely basis is Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel Murphy, but it preserves only the book’s central conceit: a set of characters constantly in pursuit of the title character ready to check out of the rat race and sever all ties with his past.
City of Pirates
Raul Ruiz’s surrealist fantasy drama features three characters – a murderous and provocative, albeit angel-faced boy, a woman who may be his mother, and a man who may be the same boy.
Brooks, Meadows and Lovely Faces
MUBI’s latest Special Discovery is this 2016 Egyptian drama from director Yousry Nasrallah. With his sons, Refaat (a passionate cook) and Galal (a womanizer), chef Yehia manages a wedding caterer. Karima, Yehia’s niece, is promised to Refaat, but he loves Shadia, without knowing that Karima loves also someone else. Over the course of the wedding, Karima finds a way to reveal her feelings.
Suddenly, Last Summer
Elizabeth Taylor. Katharine Hepburn. Montgomery Clift. Joseph L. Mankiewicz brings Tennessee Williams’ scandalous play to life in this story of wealthy widow Violet Venable, whose only son dies while on vacation with his cousin, Catherine. What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane; now, Mrs. Venable wants Catherine lobotomised to cover up the truth.
Extraordinary Stories
After Balnearios, MUBI’s Argentine season completes a double bill of Mariano Llinas’ work, with the film that saw him become a name overseas. The four-hour result entwines myriads of narratives and a celebration of storytelling, as three unconnected, voiceover-narrated tales each start off innocently enough and then veer into ever stranger, more fascinating realms – a tapestry imbued with the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson and filtered through the sensibilities of Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon.
The Truth
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Verite follows Dominique Marceau, on trial for the murder of Gilbert Tellier. The counsels duel relentlessly, elaborating explanations for why the pretty, idle woman might have killed her boyfriend.
The Event
Using only existing black-and-white footage from the time, Sergei Loznitsa (Maidan, My Joy, In The Fog) turns his exquisite, investigative eye to the failed coup of August 1991 which lead to the dissolution of the USSR.
On the streets of Saint Petersburg people gather waiting for news, improvising blockades and anxiously hoping for change, in a film which shines a light on a country in continued political upheaval.
La Sentinelle
With Ismael’s Ghosts opening Cannes and My Golden Days on the way to UK cinemas, MUBI celebrates Arnaud Desplechin with a double-bill, beginning with 1992’s La Sentinelle. The mystery thriller follows a medical intern, who finds himself drawn into a world of international intrigue after discovering a shrunken human head in his luggage.
My Sex Life or How I got into an Argument
Praised as “sublimely wayward” by the New York Times and dovetailing into My Golden Days, Desplechin’s dark comedy from 1996 follows Paul Dedalus, who is at a crossroads in his life. He has to make several decisions; should he complete his doctorate, does he want to become a full professor, does he really love his long-standing girlfriend, or should he re-start with one of his other lovers?
Ostende
MUBI’s New Argentine Cinema season continues with two from Laura Citarella. A young woman wins a 4-day vacation in a hotel in Ostende, a sea resort near Buenos Aires. It is the low season, and she gets to the place alone—her boyfriend will join her a few days later, interrupting this beach-set, intriguing micro-cosmos that might be filled with stories she doesn’t know.
Dog Lady
MUBI’s Citarella double-bill concludes with La Mujer de Los Perros. Co-director Llinás plays an intriguing, unique character in this existentialist fable about a woman who lives with a pack of dogs on the very edge of the populated world, with minimal contact with other people. The seasons come and go. On life and survival, love and death.
Abouna
The lives of two brothers, who live in N’djamena, are upended when they awake one Saturday morning to find that their father has left the family in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 2002 drama.
Three Lives and Only One Death
MUBI kicks off a mini-season exploring Raúl Ruiz’s dreams with Three Lives and Only One Death. Marcello Mastroianni stars as man who shares four names and four personalities (which is the real one?). This mysterious figure is the link between four different, yet strangely similar, stories involving love, lust, crime and time.
At Ellen’s Age
Ellen (Jeanne Balibar) must come to terms with a new turn in her life. Although her job as a flight attendant keeps her circling the globe, she feels her private life has become a kind of placebo, giving her the sense of security she needs so badly.
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Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon
After the Rehearsal
Available until end of: 25th August
Dogtown and Z-Boys
Available until end of: 26th August
Lords of Dogtown
Available until end of: 27th August
The Passenger
Available until end of: 28th August
Paper Moon
Available until end of: 29th August
Casualties of War
Available until end of: 30th August