James R | On 16, Mar 2019

MUBI builds to the climax of its Los Angeles-on-screen series with David Lynch’s seminal trip through the city of stars, Mulholland Drive. And, of course, it unleashes Under the Silver Lake in cinemas and online this week. Want see David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to It Follows? Use MUBI Go (which offers a free cinema ticket every week to its subscribers) and see Under the Silver Lake 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

Los Angeles: Los Angeles Plays Itself – 16th March

Of the cities in the world, few are depicted in and mythologized more in film and TV than the city of Los Angeles. One of the great films about films, Thom Andersen gradually builds his thesis about how Hollywood has represented, and misrepresented, its hometown, carefully weaving together footage from films made in or about the city.

Los Angeles: Mulholland Drive – 17th March

Aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives in LA and befriends an amnesiac woman (Laura Harring) and tries to help her recover her memory. David Lynch’s masterpiece blurs Hollywood fantasies and noir dreams into one intoxicating nightmare.

Luis Buñuel: Belle de Jour – 19th March

Frigid, beautiful young housewife Séverine cannot reconcile her kinky, sadomasochistic imagination with her everyday life alongside dutiful husband Pierre. She starts an afternoon job in a local, high-class brothel under the name Belle de Jour while her husband is away at work. Luis Buñuel’s dark comedy about desire is one of his biggest successes.

 

Other new releases on MUBI

MUBI Exclusive: Under the Silver Lake

When aimless slacker Sam wakes up one morning to find his beautiful neighbour Sarah has vanished without a trace, he embarks on a quest across the city to find her. A delirious neo-noir mystery about the murkiest depths of scandal and conspiracy in the Hollywood Hills. Andrew Garfield stars in the new film from David “It Follows” Robert Mitchell. Read our full review

Los Angeles: Detour

Shot in only six days, Detour is one of the great noir classics of the 40s, whose fingerprints are all over Under The Silver Lake. As he hitchhikes his way from New York to Los Angeles, a down-on-his-luck nightclub pianist finds himself with a dead body on his hands and nowhere to run—a waking nightmare that goes from bad to worse when he picks up the snarling, monstrously conniving drifter Vera, a vicious femme fatale.

Los Angeles: Drive

What do you do?” asks Carey Mulligan, sitting nervously in the kitchen. Ryan Gosling stands still. He says nothing. Then, after a few seconds, he smiles slowly. “I drive,” he says. That’s pretty much all there is to Drive, which follows the transformation of his loner from car mechanic into Man with No Name. It’s a self-aware mix tape of Taxi Driver, a Western, and classic 60s European thrillers, but Drive has a pace all of its own.

Los Angeles: They Live

MUBI begins a new series looking at Los Angeles in cinema with John Carpenter’s seminal dystopia. A streetwise drifter discovers a pair of sunglasses which allow him to see subliminal messages hidden behind every billboard, newspaper, and TV commercial in America, as well as the true faces of the masked aliens walking among us, intent to dominate our world in secret.

Luis Buñuel: Diary of a Chambermaid

MUBI’s Luis Buñuel retrospective kicks off with this wicked adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel. Jeanne Moreau is Celestine, a beautiful Parisian domestic who, upon arrival at her new job at an estate in provincial 1930s France, entrenches herself in sexual hypocrisy and scandal with her philandering employer (Michel Piccoli).

Chico & Rita

The colours of Cuba are something out of this world. That’s what made Fernando Trueba team up with designer Mariscal to tell the story of its golden years through animation. A melancholic and visually ravishing homage to the profound magic of the island, and one of its masters, pianist Bebo Valdés.

Mysterious Skin

With Now Apocalypse currently airing on STARZPLAY, don’t miss the chance to go back to see New Queer Cinema pioneer Gregg Araki at his peak with this incendiary coming-of-age drama, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Sally Potter: Orlando

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

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.

Exclusive: Nina

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.

The Portrait of a Lady

Nicole Kidman stars in Jane Campion’s stunning update of Henry James’ novel. In late 19th century Europe, resolute young American Isabel Archer rejects a proposal from her English cousin, and falls prey to the schemes of two expatriates, an independent and worldly woman, and a dilettante artist with little means but enough cunning to woo Isabel.

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: 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

Kazuhiroo Soda: Inland Sea

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.

Kazuhiroo Soda: Peace

Peace is a film composed by a master observer—harmonizing an intimate portrait of an elderly couple with an erudite meditation on the nature and the function of peace in modern life.

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.

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.

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

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.

 

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

 

Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon

Brothers of the Night
Available until end of: 16th March

Winter’s Bone
Available until end of: 17th March

Foxcatcher
Available until end of: 18th March

The Day After
Available until end of: 19th March

Tokyo-Ga
Available until end of: 20th March

The Virgin Spring
Available until end of: 21st March

Beasts of the Southern Wild
Available until end of: 22nd March

A Foreign Affair
Available until end of: 23rd March

21 Grams
Available until end of: 24th March

A Separation
Available until end of: 25th March

 

Add to Watchlist