James R | On 19, Jan 2019

MUBI joins in with MyFrenchFilmFestival once again this year, with a trio of titles that includes a thriller starring Vincent Cassel and a comedy from Rubber director Quintin Dupieux. Along with the latest new filmmakers from across the Channel, MUBI continues to look back at cinema’s past, with its Wim Wenders and Hong Sang-soo retrospectives. On the big screen, meanwhile, you can use MUBI Go (which offers a free cinema ticket every week to its subscribers) to catch Hale County This Morning, This Evening 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

MyFFF: Keep an Eye Out – 19th January

MUBI begins a trio of titles from this year’s My French Film Festival with Quentin Dupieux’s absurd new comedy. Keep an Eye Out places asinine slapstick and ingenuous dialogue in the ripe confines of a police interrogation to chaotic, hilarious and cathartic effect.

MyFFF: Let the Girls Play – 20th January

The true, kick-ass story of the first female football team in France, this comedy puts the macho alpha males of the late 60s back in their place, and scores with every joke.

Hong Sang-soo: Right Now, Wrong Then – 21st January

MUBI’s Hong Sang-soo retrospective continues with his wickedly conceptual comedy of melancholy and life choices. Two dueling narratives of varying possibilities, chance, and outcome, all of Hong’s storytelling gambits pay off in this Golden Leopard winner.

Wim Wenders: Kings of the Road – 22nd January

A roving film projector repairman saves the life of a depressed psychologist who has driven his car into a river, and they end up on the road together, traveling from one rural German movie theater to another. Along the way, the two men, each running from his past, bond over their shared loneliness.

Hanagatami – 24th January

Spring, 1941. 16-year-old Toshihiko attends school in the coastal town of Karatsu, where his aunt cares for his ailing cousin. Immersed in the seaside’s nature and culture, Toshihiko soon befriends the town’s other extraordinary adolescents as they all contend with the war’s gravitational pull.

 

Other new releases on MUBI

Island of the Hungry Ghosts

On Christmas island, one of the planet’s largest land migrations takes place. Forty million crabs make their way through dense jungle to the sea. But the island’s sublime beauty hides another, darker presence: the Australian government runs a high-security detention facility for asylum-seekers.

Charlie Wilson’s War

Written by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and directed by Mike Nichols (The Graduate), Charlie Wilson’s War is a political comedy teeming with refreshing humour to confront a nigh forgotten political gamble taken amidst the cold war.

Hong Sang-soo: Nobody’s Daughter Haewon

Is she tired of life or love? Why else is Haewon falling asleep in a restaurant? Haewon, a student, feels abandoned. Her mother is about to emigrate to Canada and Haewon has decided to end her affair with one of her professors because he is so unsupportive…

Wim Wenders: Alice in the Cities

Phillip is a roving German reporter who, after a chance encounter with an elusive American woman, reluctantly accepts temporary custody of little Alice. Their friendship grows while traveling through various European cities on a search for the girl’s grandmother.

Vanderweerd: Lost Land

MUBI showcases rising Belgian documentarian Pierre-Yves Vanderweerd, who departs from staid convention to embrace the poetic and sensorial possibilities of evoking the lives of lost peoples, their outer landscapes and inner beings.

Vanderweerd: The Eternals

Vanderweerd’s latest feature beautifully, movingly captures the condition of those stranded in a conflict forgotten by most.

The Blues Brothers

A pair of two-bit crooks go on a quest to save the Catholic orphanage where they were raised by reuniting their former band for a charity gig.

Directors’ Debuts: The Loveless

Kathryn Bigelow made her directorial debut with this atmospheric dive into the rebellious, leather-clad world of motorcycle gangs. In 1959, a group of bikers en route to the races at Daytona get waylaid in a rural Georgia town in this homage to The Wild One. The film studiously examines Americana, personified by the loitering youths, languidly revealing a simmering tension that culminates in stylised chaos.

Directors’ Debuts: Shadows

Set in New York City, circa 1960, a passionate interracial romance between a fair African-American woman, Lelia, and a white man, Tony, erupts when he meets Lelia’s darker-skinned jazz singer brother, and discovers that her racial heritage is not what he thought it was.

Directors’ Debuts: The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The goalkeeper Josef Bloch is sent off after committing a foul during an away game. This causes him to completely lose his bearings. He wanders aimlessly through the city streets and spends the night with the box-office attendant of a movie theatre.

Directors’ Debuts: Funny Ha Ha

When you graduate college you easily sashay into the world of adulthood, start a career, and get serious, right? Wrong. Marnie has left college, but not her drinking habits and her bad taste in bad men. It would be sad if it weren’t so funny a tone ably struck by mumblecore pioneer Andrew Bujalski in his first feature film.

Directors’ Debuts: Crisis

MUBI kicks off its new run of directorial debuts with the first film from Ingmar Bergman. Ingeborg is a small-town piano teacher who raises her foster daughter, Nelly, into young adulthood. When Nelly is eighteen, she is shocked by the arrival of Jenny, her mother, whom she calls “Auntie.” Jenny wants to take her to the big city and teach her to be a beautician in her salon.

Directors’ Debuts: Poison

Inspired by the writings of Jean Genet, Poison sees Todd Haynes explores sexuality by deftly interweaving a trio of provocative tales—”Hero,” “Horror,” and “Homo”—with different cinematic styles in color and black and white.

Directors’ Debuts: My Twentieth Century

Born on the day Edison invents the light bulb, Dora and Lili are separated in childhood after their mother’s death, and follow different paths. They meet again on the Orient Express in 1899, one a con woman, scamming money from men, the other a member of a group of feminist revolutionaries. Ildikó Enyedi (On Body And Soul) took home the Cannes Camera d’Or in 1989 with this hall-of-mirrors comedy, infused with a fierce originality and the unfading charm of silent cinema.

byNWR: Chained Girls

Joseph P. Mawra pulls out all the stops to paint a picture of the “plight” of the lesbian, circa 1965. A grindhouse picture for the raincoat crowd, this dubiously dated film is recommend by MUBI as an accidental documentary of mid-60s Greenwich Village.

“This treasure from the gutter was another lucky find at a closed film lab, lovingly restored from the original 35mm negative by the byNWR team. So cheap was the production that the “library” background music came off vinyls. We have left in the original surface noise, just as it was in 1965.” — NWR

Occidental

The mood is heated. Demonstrations are taking place across France, also in front of the Paris hotel where an Italian named Giorgio is booking the bridal suite for him and his boyfriend Antonio. Hotel manager Diana doesn’t trust them and calls the police to get rid of the odd couple.

Renzo Piano, the Architect of Light

Award-winning filmmaker Carlos Saura follows Renzo Piano in the construction of one of his most iconic projects – the Centro Botín art gallery, located in Santander. A rigorous interrogation of the relationship between architecture and cinema, as both artists delve into the creative process behind this remarkable structure that altered the landscape and artistry of the city.

Pity

Babis Makridis directs this darkly funny story of a man who feels happy only when he is unhappy: addicted to sadness, with such need for pity, that he’s willing to do everything to evoke it from others. This is the life of a man in a world not cruel enough for him.

 

A monthly subscription to MUBI costs £7.99 a month, with a 30-day free trial.

 

Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon

Blood Simple
Available until end of: 19th January

A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop
Available until end of: 20th January

Potiche
Available until end of: 21st January

The Ice Storm
Available until end of: 22nd January

Persepolis
Available until end of: 23rd January

The Family
Available until end of: 24th January

Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Available until end of: 25th January

Lost in Translation
Available until end of: 26th January

The City of Lost Children
Available until end of: 27th January

Looper
Available until end of: 28th January

The Cotton Club
Available until end of: 29th January

 

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