The Weekly MUBI Digest | 20th October 2018
David Farnor | On 20, Oct 2018
With the London Film Festival drawing to a close, MUBI is once again doing what it does best: singling out some of the best hidden gems from the line-up and bringing them to its subscribers. At the same time, it’s preparing for Halloween with a curated collection of chillers old and new – or, if crime drama’s more your thing, use MUBI GO (which offers a free cinema ticket every week to its subscribers) to see Matteo Garrone’s Dogman, available 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
Halloween Horrors: It Follows – 20th October
Imagine someone walking towards you. Not very scary, is it? Wait until you see It Follows. David Robert Mitchell’s horror thriller follows Jay (Maika Monroe), who finds herself on a date gone terrifyingly wrong, when she wakes up post-sex strapped to a chair and is told that something is going to try and kill her. Why? We don’t know. Who? We don’t know that either. What we do know is that this entity will continue following her until it catches her and shuffles her off her mortal coil. It’s clever. It’s unconventional. And it’s very, very creepy. Read our full review
London Film Festival: Yours in Sisterhood – 21st October
More than looking for one definition of feminism, Irene Lusztig’s deceptively simple, wonderfully polyhedral doc embraces all feminisms. Building a bridge between the 70s and today’s world, this modern take on the epistolary genre is an affecting celebration of womanhood and the act of listening.
London Film Festival: Trees Down Here – 23rd October
To close MUBI’s LFF series, and direct from their visionary Experimenta sidebar, is a new work by UK artist Ben Rivers. Shot on 16mm and co-produced by MUBI, it playfully captures the delicate balance not just between past design and new innovation, but also between human creation and that of nature.
Halloween Horrors: The Curse of Frankenstein – 24th October
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing unite for this Hammer Studios interpretation of the Promethean tale of reanimation. Refocusing towards the moral failings of Frankenstein’s experiment, Curse immerses one fully in the existential failure and dread of Mary Shelley’s masterwork.
Kevin Everson: Spicebush – 25th October
MUBI concludes its close-up on Everson’s distinctive work with his feature debut. Melding different registers and types of footage, an episodic, expansive view on black America emerges breathing with poetic and political pulse. A mysterious little girl is a leitmotiv, the chorus of this composition.
Other new releases on MUBI
Gomorrah
Without a hint of romanticism or sentimentality, Matteo Garrone brings together a large ensemble of characters to build a broad panorama of the cause and effects of criminal life in Naples.
The Wolf House
With echoes of animation giants Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers, this gothic Chilean oddity is as nightmarish as cinema gets. Sinuously connecting Nazism and Pinochet, La Casa Lobo subverts the logic of fairy tales and the idea of home, to deliver a phantasmagoric allegory of terrifying beauty.
Winchester ’73
In Winchester ’73, the first of the Mann-Stewart westerns, Stewart is driven anti-hero Lin McAdam, out to avenge the heinous murder of his father — and, in a parallel pursuit, to recover a much-coveted stolen rifle, now passing from hand to hand.
Rodrigo Cortes: Buried
Ryan Rodney Reynolds delivers one of his career’s best turns in this thriller about a truck driver in Iraq who wakes up to find himself buried alive. With nothing but a lighter and a mobile phone, his attempt to escape is cleverly written to last the 95 minutes, while director Rodrigo Cortes does innovative things with his tiny space. Grippingly claustrophobic stuff.
Rodrigo Cortes: Red Lights
Psychologist Margaret Matheson and her assistant specialise in debunking those claiming to possess paranormal psychic powers. When Tom decides to re-open the case of notorious blind psychic Simon Silver, Margaret cautions him against the idea. Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro and Cillian Murphy star in Rodrigo Cortes’ ambitious mystery thriller.
London Film Festival: Theatre of War
Multi-disciplinary artist Lola Arias’ first documentary is a striking experiment: an exploration of war trauma that reflects on the possibilities of artifice to activate memory and revisit History through storytelling.
London Film Festival: The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin
This original short by maverick American artist Benjamin Crotty, gorgeously shot by Sean Price Williams (Good Time, Listen Up Philip), is clever, silly, political, hilarious and bizarre.
We Own the Night
One of America’s best, James Gray makes heart-felt, precisely evoked dramas as if the New American Cinema era was still happening. In 1988, New York’s police wage an all-out war on drugs. Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix), manager of a nightclub that is often frequented by gangsters, tries to remain neutral but hides a potentially fatal secret: his brother (Mark Wahlberg) and father (Robert Duvall) are both cops.
In the City of Sylvia
30 years after Buñuel’s last work, his fellow countryman José Luis Guerín comes up with a new, acclaimed, sensual film also about “that obscure object of desire”, as a young painter arrives in Strasbourg in search of a woman who bewitched him six years earlier.
In the House
Prolific French filmmaker François Ozon (Swimming Pool, Frantz) crafts this creative thriller: a cat-and-mouse game between a teacher and his creative writing student, whose ever-elaborating story-within-a-story begins to entwine everyone around him. An inventive and entertaining literary comedy. Read our full review.
Exclusive: Have a Nice Day
A hard rain is about to fall on a small town in Southern China. News of a robbery spreads fast, and over the course of one night everyone starts looking for the stolen swag. A whirlwind neo-noir, and a pioneering slice of independent Chinese animation. Read our full review
I Love You Phillip Morris
If you thought you would never see Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor passionately in love, think again. Based on the real life of a police officer-turned-con man, the naughty boys behind Bad Santa deliver an outrageously funny black comedy about love and deception, as hysterical as it is subversive. Read our full review
Crimes of Passion
Ken Russell’s second Hollywood film is a deliriously demented erotic thriller with Kahleeen Turner as the ballsy hooker playing dangerous games with two unstable clients. One is a guilt-tormented private detective while the other is a deeply disturbed preacher wielding a weaponised vibrator.
Antiviral
The directorial debut of Brandon Cronenberg, set in a scathingly satirical future where fans buy celebrities’ illnesses to be closer to their idols, feels a lot like something his dad would make. In this case, that’s no bad thing. Read our full review.
Hitchcock Classics: Frenzy
MUBI moves to the Master of Suspense’s natal London for its season finale. Wickedly violent and perversely funny, Frenzy is a self-referential, serial killer thriller variation on the wrongly accused man theme. Hitch does it again: he has us at the edge of our seats, and fully aware of his genius.
byNWR: Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers
A late entry in the “hicksploitation,” country music, drive-in movie genre, this eye-poppingly colourful oddball corrals a motley crew of lesser-known music performers and fading Hollywood legends (Lila Lee and Sonny Tufts) into a moonshine-soaked sort-of-chase picture, punctuated by great tunes.
“We are excited to present this regional curiosity in its new sparkling restoration, made from the original 35mm negative. Previous releases were plagued by murky sound and dull colors that didn’t do justice to the Florida-location photography. Here’s your chance to watch it as never before! ” —NWR
Kevin Everson: Quality Control
Consisting of a series of 16mm single take shots filmed in the summer of 2010, Quality Control represents the careful labour of workers on the production line of a large-scale dry cleaning operation in Pritchard, Alabama.
Kevin Everson: Ears, Nose and Throat
During an extensive, ear, nose and throat examination, Shadeena Brooks recounts a horrible event she eye-witnessed on a street in Mansfield, Ohio.
Kevin Everson: Cinnamon
In his debut film, a multi-faceted exploration of drag racing in the Midwest, Kevin Jerome Everson fully encompasses the community, ecstasy, and expertise of this unusual sport. Gently drifting between fiction and reality, Cinnamon is an eloquent expression of black unity and excellence.
Kevin Everson: Three Quarters
Under the interrupted gaze of cinema, Kevin Jerome Everson offers us two magic tricks in this minimal tribute to the craft of street magic. An aptly mysterious object, Three Quarters at once expands Everson’s project of expressing dextrous skills while also abstracting them in further enigma.
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Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon
Irreversible
Available until end of: 20th October
Enter the Void
Available until end of: 21st October
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Available until end of: 22nd October
Landscape in the Mist
Available until end of: 23rd October
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Available until end of: 24th October
Automatic at Sea
Available until end of: 25th October
The Island of St. Matthews
Available until end of: 26th October
Antiviral
Available until end of: 27th October
10,000km
Available until end of: 28th October
Marnie
Available until end of: 29th October