James R | On 05, May 2018

MUBI is heading to Cannes once again this year, with the world’s biggest film festival taking over the subscription service to offer a collection of Croisette favourites. Every year, the creme de la creme of the movie industry flock to the French Riviera for a fortnight of premieres, boozing and schmoozing, and MUBI has been increasingly at the centre of it, joining rivals such as Amazon and Netflix in trying to snap up the best titles from the festival’s line-up.

Last year, MUBI premiered The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki and Bruno Dumont’s Slack Bay (Ma Loute), which it acquired in 2016. The coming fortnight will see both return to its streaming library, alongside classics old and new. All that and a film starring a young Dennis Hopper and a mermaid? What more could you want?

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

 

This week on MUBI

Closer – 5th May

Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen and Julia Robert are painfully raw in this spiky drama about the intertwining, romantic entanglements of two unhappy couples, based on Patrick Marber’s 1997 stage play of the same name. Accomplished, classy, caustic viewing.

Touch of Evil – 6th May

Orson Welles’ 1958 classic isn’t just a technical masterpiece, but a dark slice of thrilling noir to boot, featuring an explosive opening scene (shot in one take) that is worth watching for alone.

Douglas Sirk: The Tarnished Angels – 7th May

In this spectacular adaptation of Faulkner’s Pylon, Roger Shumann is a disillusioned WWI ace seeking out a living as a barnstorming pilot/parachutist during the early 30s. New Orleans newspaperman Burke Devlin meets Shumann at a two-bit carnival and becomes fascinated with his fall from grace.

Cannes Classics: The Other Side – 8th May

Disarmed veterans, taciturn adolescents or drug addicts live in an invisible territory at the margins of society, at the border between anarchy and illegality, trying to respond to a threat: of being forgotten by political institutions and having their rights as citizens trampled.

Cannes Classics: The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things – 9th May

An adaptation of one of the most controversial books of our time, Asia Argento’s sophomore feature realizes JT Leroy’s account of her troubled childhood. Whether its inspiring text is to be taken as truth or performance art—Argento’s star-studded film is a gamut of pure emotion & raucous sincerity.

Cannes Classics: Beyond My Grandfather Allende – 10th May

“Salvador Allende, the first democratic-socialist president elected was also my grandfather. Thirty-five years after Pincohet’s coup, I return to Chile searching for Chicho- his family nickname – wishing to leave behind his iconic image and bring back images and memories of him and our family.”

Cannes Classics: Slack Bay – 11th May

Northern France, 1910. The bourgeois Van Peteghem family return to their towering mansion above ‘Slack Bay’ every summer. An unlikely romance blossoms between the mischievous Bille Van Peteghem and local mussel-gatherer, ‘Ma Loute’. Meanwhile, a series of mysterious disappearances are taking place. Read our full review.

 

Other new releases on MUBI

byNWR: Night Tide

MUBI’s partnership with byNWR continues with Curtis Harrington’s 1961 fantasy horror, starring a young Dennis Hopper as sailor on shore leave, who becomes fascinated by a woman posing as a mermaid in an oceanfront carnival. As their relationship blossoms, Johnny realises that Mora is more than a sideshow illusionist.

byNWR: Shanty Tramp

MUBI continues its partnership with Nicolas Winding Refn’s new streaming platform, dedicated to reviving old curious and forgotten genre flicks. In this case, it’s Jose Prieto’s 1967 Shanty Tramp, which sees a small-town Southern prostitute have to decide between her lust for a Black man and her meal-ticket, the sleazy revival-tent preacher who’s just rolled into town.

“A worldwide search was conducted to collect the best extant 35mm materials of this cult classic. The prints were so severely damaged that it required months of chemical treatment to make the film pliable and flat enough to work with, in order to create this outstanding new reconstruction.” —NWR

May 68: Half a Life

Combining home movies, archival footage, and interviews, Goupil recounts his youth in the years leading up to May 1968, and the decade following it, climaxing with the suicide of his friend Michel Recanati. A blend of bildungsroman and political essay, the film witnesses the youthful romantics of revolt and the grief attached to age and disillusionment.

May 68: In the Intense Now

No Intenso Agora blends a cornucopia of archive materials documenting the uprisings of 1968 as they unfolded across four different countries. Narrated in first person by the director, the amateur footage includes scenes that a tourist—Salles’ mother—filmed in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Divorce American Style: The Squid and the Whale

This awkwardly hilarious and astutely painful study of a family going through a divorce was Noah Baumbach’s breakthrough film, boasting a cast that includes Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Anna Paquin and a young Jesse Eisenberg. Made all too aware of each character’s faults, hazy middle-ground is all that awaits our sympathies and Baumbach nudges us around in the emotional mist with masterful precision. Read our full review

Divorce American Style: Husbands and Wives

Is love seizing a chance to be single? Or is it tolerating a partner’s flaws? Earnest monologues to the camera unravel the emotional mess of human relationships in Woody Allen’s faux-documentary, starring Judy Davis and Liam Neeson. Read our review

Divorce American Style: The Awful Truth

Stanley Cavell calls films like this masterpiece a comedy of remarriage, a new story forged at the height of the screwballs where a couple falls apart and we watch as they flirt, fight and fall in love all over again. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne star.

Remembering Miloš Forman: Audition

This mix of documentary and fiction offers a humorous look at different kinds of competitions and the motivations of their talented (and less-talented) participants. Set to a wonderful, diverse soundtrack of Czech music, Forman’s first major work is both light and passionate in tone.

Remembering Miloš Forman: Loves of A Blonde

From the first pangs of romance to its inevitable disappointments, Loves of a Blonde immediately became a classic of the Czech New Wave and earned Miloš Forman the first of his Academy Award nominations.

This Is the End

What if the apocalypse was actually one of those drunken house parties you went to as a teenager? What if it was populated by pretentious, narcissistic, obnoxious individuals you would normally avoid, but you got drunk and your friend who is driving you home wants to stay at the party so you’re stuck there? That’s This Is the End, a knowing, self-aware comedy about celebrities playing themselves. It’s fun, but not quite the LOL-pocalypse that was prophesied. Read our full review

The Fall

Los Angeles, circa 1920s, a little immigrant girl in a hospital recovering from a fall, strikes up a friendship with a bedridden man. He captivates her with a whimsical story that removes her far from the hospital doldrums into the exotic landscapes of her imagination. Tarsem Singh’s 2006 fantasy is visually jaw-dropping.

Gholam

Fresh from its recent cinema release, and based on her award-winning photographic series on Iranians in exile Border, renowned artist Mitra Trabizian’s first film perceptively captures the displacement of life in the diaspora. A minimalist nocturnal thriller with a laconic yet remarkable turn by Shahab Hosseini (A Separation, The Salesman).

Douglas Sirk: All I Desire

In 1900, Naomi Murdoch deserted her small-town family to go on the stage. Some ten years later, daughter Lily invites Naomi back to see her in the Riverdale high school play.

Douglas Sirk: Written on the Wind

Lust and impotence, booze, oil money and family scions—and above all, desire for approval, for love. Douglas Sirk’s resplendent melodrama, too often taken as camp, is as serious as cinema gets. Only, Sirk heightens it all: colors bursting, neuroses tormenting, libidos raging—excess barely contained.

Douglas Sirk: There’s Always Tomorrow

Melodrama is once again subterfuge in Douglas Sirk’s forbidden romance wherein true love is practically outlawed by suburban American life. Starring screen legend Barbara Stanwyck.

Douglas Sirk: All That Heaven Allows

A melodrama so suffused with emotion, so ripe with sincerity and irony, so bountiful in color and design that it was remade beautifully not only by Fassbinder but also by Todd Haynes. Yet nothing compares to the original: a sublime experience effortlessly blending sweeping story and social critique.

Angela Schanelec: The Dreamed Path

Theres and Kenneth are young, when they first meet in their summer holidays in Greece. They fall in love with each other but can’t prevent the forthcoming separation. Thirty years later, in another country – another couple. Ariane leaves her husband David, because she doesn’t love him anymore.

Angela Schanelec: Afternoon

MUBI’s series devoted to Angela Schanelec continues with this sun-drenched snapshot of a subtly distraught summer holiday shared between lakeside neighbours. The film generously lets us piece together relationships, family drama and love’s hurt through oblique observation and heart-felt restraint.

Angela Schanelec: Orly

Airports are places of transit and fortuitous synchronicity. In Orly, Angela Schanelec’s camera delicately infiltrates the geometric architecture of the building and, with the right distance from her characters, captures the elusiveness of happenstance to achieve unsuspected emotional resonance.

 

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

 

Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon

Cafe de Flore
Available until end of: 5th May

Dolls
Available until end of: 6th May

Marie Antoinette
Available until end of: 7th May

Magnificent Obsession
Available until end of: 8th May

Kekszakallu
Available until end of: 9th May

Papirosen
Available until end of: 10th May

Marseille
Available until end of: 11th May

Absence of Malice
Available until end of: 12th May

Tootsie
Available until end of: 13th May

Shanty Tramp
Available until end of: 14th May

All That Heaven Allows
Available until end of: 15th May

The Mist
Available until end of: 16th May

Gholam
Available until end of: 17th May

 

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