James R | On 23, Nov 2019

MUBI serves up a week of auteurs to close out November, with offerings from Alain Resnais, Jean Renoir, Lars von Trier and Jim Jarmusch. That takes us on a journey from zombie stoner comedy to graphic, grief-stricken horror.

Want to see something on the big screen? Use MUBI Go (which offers a free cinema ticket every week to its subscribers), to see Marriage Story before it arrives on Netflix at participating theatres. (You can see our guide to where Marriage Story is showing in cinemas here, although not all cinemas will be participating in MUBI Go.)

Otherwise, don’t miss your chance to catch London Film Festival favourite Yves Saint Laurent: The Last Collection this week – you can read our review here.

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

 

This week on MUBI

The Wonders – 23rd November

The second film from Happy as Lazzaro director Alice Rohrwacher follows an extraordinary summer for Gelsomina and her three younger sisters, in which the strict rules that hold the family together begin to break: due to the arrival of Martin, a German boy on a youth rehabilitation program, and also the community’s participation in a TV competition. A bittersweet and beautiful coming-of-ager. Read our full review

Antichrist – 24th November

Chaos reigns in Lars von Trier’s provocative, graphic, shocking study of grief and violence.

Picnic on the Grass – 25th November

Etienne Alexis, a candidate for the presidency of the new Europe, is a pompous scientist promoting artificial insemination. However, while hosting a picnic, he encounters a young, modern peasant woman, Nénette, and learns that science sometimes does not have all the answers.

Bixa Travesty – 26th November

A portrait of transgender musician and artist Linn da Quebrada, who uses her body and performances as weapons to fight machismo, transphobia, and racism. She speaks of her growing up as a black queer in São Paulo’s favelas, and the challenges of breaking into Brazil’s heteronormative funk scene.

Resnais: Private Fears in Public Places – 27th November

Six Parisians engage in a lonely and mostly unsuccessful search for real love: Nicole and Dan are engaged to be married, but his drinking drives them apart; Thierry flirts with a religious colleague, Charlotte, who has a secret vice; Gaëlle answers numerous personal ads, but her dates never show up.

Resnais: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet – 28th November

Before his death, a renowned dramatist arranges to have friends who appeared in his play Eurydice summoned to his home, to participate in his funeral and to see a performance of the play by an avant-garde acting company. Surprises await them, as they also find themselves unwitting participants.

Jarmusch: Only Lovers Left Alive – 29th November

Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are two vampires whose love affair has lasted centuries. She’s living in Tangier; he’s in Detroit. But when Adam gets lonely and depressed, Eve makes her way across the world to snap him out of his stupor. Director Jim Jarmusch switches gears once more to tell this entrancing outing, which manages to be part stoner comedy, part horror and part examination of contemporary culture. Read our full review

Jarmusch: Paterson – 30th November

Adam Driver is fantastic in Jim Jarmusch’s charming drama about Paterson, a bus driver who lives in Paterson. Every day, Paterson adheres to a simple routine: he drives his bus, observing the city and overhearing fragments of conversation; he writes poetry; he walks his dog; he goes to the same bar to drink a beer; he goes home to his wife Laura. Read our full review

 

Other new releases on MUBI

Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus

While on a trip in Chile with friends, insensitive American Jamie (Michael Cera) drunkenly invites an eccentric woman to join them and experience the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus. The woman’s free nature clashes with Jamie’s self-absorbed personality as they head to the desert for a disturbing, psychedelic trip. This Sebastián Silva joint is a low-budget gem, sweet and stoned in equal measure.

Haneke: Hidden

Georges, who hosts a TV literary review, receives anonymous packages containing videos of himself with his family, shot secretly from the street, and alarming, obscure drawings. There’s no commentary, no threats, but the message is clear: You’re being watched. Slowly, dark revelations come to light.

Ospina: It All Started at the End

“Grupo de Cali” (also known as “Caliwood”), a group of friends in love with cinema, who in the midst of the partying and historical chaos between 1971 and 1991, managed to produce a body of work now considered a fundamental part of Colombia’s film history.

My Skin, Luminous

Having lost the pigment in his skin, Matias, an infirmed orphan at a Michoacán primary school, has been quarantined from his classmates. Meanwhile, the presence and words of novelist Mario Bellatin offer the prospect of healing to his ailing body.

Ozon: Water Drops on Burning Rocks

Working from an unproduced play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon made one of the most inventive films of his career with this 70s period piece. A synthesis of subversive genres: part musical, part sex farce, a little melodrama, Water Drops on Burning Rocks is a remarkably sardonic love story.

Ozon: 5×2

As young French couple Gilles and Marion officially separate, we see, in reverse order, five milestone moments in their relationship: their divorce, a tense dinner with friends, the birth of their child, their joyous wedding and their first encounter.

The Devil’s Wanton (or Prison)

A film director is approached by his old math teacher with a great movie idea: the Devil declares that the Earth is hell. The director is skeptical, but subsequent events in the life of a writer friend and his young sex worker lover make him reconsider the math teacher’s idea.

Intolerable Cruelty

Miles, a successful divorce lawyer, feels something is missing from his lifestyle despite his wealth and status. When he uses his skills to ensure that gold-digger Marylin gets nothing in her divorce from his client, she vows revenge, leading to their mutual one-upmanship and increasing attraction.

The Palm Beach Story

Claudette Colbert intends to leave her husband, Joel McCrea, a struggling New York architect, and move to Palm Beach in a matter-of-fact search for a wealthy husband—to help fund the work of her true love, McCrea. Not willing to give her up, McCrea follows in hot pursuit.

MUBI Release: A Dog Called Money

Award-winning war photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy explores the creative inspiration behind PJ Harvey’s album The Hope Six Demolition Project, filming her in a London recording studio and charting their travels together in Afghanistan, Kosovo and the U.S.

Haneke: The Piano Teacher

Erika, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, lives with her tyrannical mother in a hermetically sealed world of love-hate and dependency in which there is no room for men. Then one of Erika’s pupils decides to seduce his teacher…

A Paper Tiger

MUBI’s Luis Ospina tribute continues with this apocryphal doc playfully braiding reality, fiction and historical revisionism. Inviting the audience to participate in a game of deception, A Paper Tiger is a meditation on the elusive meaning of art—and cinema—where truth and lies become indiscernible.

Alice T.

Alice is an adopted teenager who has a strained relationship with her adoptive mother. Being an endless source of problems, Alice forges lies and blurs the lines between the fiction she creates and her real existence. One day, Alice confesses that she is pregnant and that she wants to keep the baby.

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Monty Python’s Meaning of Life

The Monty Python collective explains it all in this episodic comedy. Overworked insurance clerks are staging a mutiny. They succesfully gain control of the building. But the building suddenly turns into a ship…

Resnais: Last Year At Marienbad

Part mystery, part fever dream, and possibly a ghost story, Last Year At Marienbad follows a married woman, A, and a man, X, through the empty rooms of a luxurious, baroque hotel that time forgot. X tries to persuade the incredulous A that they met in the same place the year before.

Resnais: Stavisky

Biarritz, 1933. Charm and talent help small-time swindler Serge Alexandre, alias Stavisky, to bribe his way into the centre of French political power. But when his great scam involving millions gets exposed, he brings the government to the verge of collapse and the country to the brink of civil war.

The Two Irenes

By chance, Irene discovers that there is another 13-year-old Irene living in the same town. Curiously, she observes the confident, cheerful girl who lives alone with her mother. She is fascinated by this other world beyond the bounds of her own well-to-do and traditional family.

Port of Call

Berit, a suicidal young woman living in a working-class port town, unexpectedly falls for Gösta, a sailor on leave. Haunted by a troubled past and held in a vice grip by her domineering mother, Berit begins to hope that her relationship with Gösta might save her from self-destruction.

L’Enfant Secret

A hidden gem from Philippe Garrel’s haunting filmography, this pocket melodrama meditates on loss, filmmaking, and the obstacles of an unstable relationship. Borrowing biographical details from the French auteur’s own love story with the singer Nico, L’enfant secret is a work of intimate poetry.

 

A monthly subscription to MUBI costs £9.99 a month, with a 30-day free trial.

 

Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon

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The Souvenir
Available until end of: 23rd November

Criminal Lovers
Available until end of: 24th November

Peeping Tom
Available until end of: 24th November

Animal Kingdom
Available until end of: 24th November

L’Enfant Secret
Available until end of: 24th November

Yves Saint Laurent: The Last Collections
Available until end of: 24th November

The Birds
Available until end of: 24th November

Murder in Mississippi
Available until end of: 30th November

Under the Sand
Available until end of: 1st December

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
Available until end of: 2nd December

The Vampires of Poverty
Available until end of: 3rd December

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