The Weekly MUBI Digest | 9th December
David Farnor | On 09, Dec 2017
This weekend sees the online premiere of MUBI’s latest exclusive acquisition, Alain Gomes’ stunning Felicite. (You can read our full review here.) To celebrate, MUBI also looks back at Gomes’ award-winning debut, while also bringing us the two most recent works by Colombia-born, France-based artist filmmaker Camilo Restrepo – a striking diptych exploring identity, colonialism and death through the power of music and the materiality of (16mm) film.
This week, though, is as much about the films about to depart MUBI’s line-up, from On Body and Soul and Arabian Nights to Heat and The Fountain.
What’s new, coming soon and leaving soon on the subscription service? This is your weekly MUBI Digest:
This week on MUBI
Felicite – 9th December
Félicité, free and proud, is a singer in the evenings in a bar in Kinshasa. Her life changes when her 14-year-old son is the victim of a motorcycle accident. To save him, she begins a frantic race through the streets of an electric Kinshasa, a world of music and dreams. Winner of Berlin’s Silver Bear, Alain Gomes’ fantastic film is the latest to be snapped up exclusively by MUBI. (Read our full review.)
Cilaos – 13th December
To keep a promise made to her dying mother, a young woman goes off in search of her father, a womanizer she has never met. Along the way, she soon learns that he is dead. But that doesn’t change her plans – she still intends to find him. The first of two shorts from Camilo Restrepo.
La Bouche – 14th December
MUBI completes its double-bill of Camilo Restrepo shorts with the story of a man, who learns of the brutal death of his daughter, murdered by her husband.
Other new releases on MUBI
It Felt Like Love
With Beach Rats now in cinemas and on VOD, MUBI takes us back to director Eliza Hittman’s debut, It Felt Like Love. 14-year-old Lila is experiencing an ennui-filled Brooklyn summer playing third wheel to Chiara, her more experienced friend, and Chiara’s boyfriend, Patrick. Determined to have a love interest of her own, a bravado-filled Lila pursues Sammy and manipulates herself deeper into his world.
As a Man
With the superb Félicité out now, MUBI looks back at Gomis’ impressive debut. Winner of Locarno’s Silver Leopard, As A Man poses razor-sharp questions around the notion of exile, investigating what it means to be trapped between two worlds yet feel like an outsider in both.
Irma Vep
MUBI has teamed up with Mondo to create New Art for Timeless Cinema, a series of newly imagined artwork for masterful pieces of cinema – starting with Olivier Assayas and Maggie Cheung’s meta, modern class.
Once Upon a Time in America
The final film by Sergio Leone finds the maestro audaciously and ambitiously going beyond his Spaghetti Western roots for a sprawling, multi-decade New York crime epic. Robert De Niro leads a production at once resplendent and gritty—a familiar setting given operatic majesty and force by Leone. De Niro. James Woods. Leone. What more do you need?
Film Socalisme
MUBI celebrates Jean-Luc Godard’s birthday with his dense and provocative collage-drama-essay. A colour saturated tour of the Mediterranean frames its exploration, ranging from a modern French family to European history’s myths, lies, and truths.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
This film, and its companion piece Going Home are documentaries in the form of home movies. It records the return visit of brothers Jonas and Adolfas Mekas to their homeland of Lithuania.
Lost, Lost, Lost
Walden may have been Mekas’ first diary film, but the film that incorporated Mekas’ earliest footage was the one that told the story of his postwar arrival in America, Lost Lost Lost.
Antiporno
MUBI’s latest Special Discovery pick is from Sion Sono. It follows Kyoko, a 21-year-old artist who loves being at the center of attention. One day, feeling down, she lashes out against her assistant, sexually humiliating her in front of the rest of the staff. Suddenly someone yells “Cut!” and we realise that they are actually on a movie set…
LA Confidential
Curtis Hanson’s masterful neo-noir brings period Los Angeles to stylish, gripping life, with Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe on fine form as a pair of cops drawn together by murder, a mysterious woman and the city’s seedy underbelly.
Yumeji
Yumeji follows real-life painter-poet Yumeji Takehisa, who strays from his lover when he falls for the beautiful and newly windowed Tomoyo.
Fatal Assistance
Filmed over two years, Haitian-born Raoul Peck’s powerful exposé examines the staggering failures, global and local, that have stranded a vulnerable nation in the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake.
Murder in Pacot
In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, a middle-aged Port-au-Prince couple come face to face with the stark contradictions of Haitian society when they are forced to rent out their villa to a foreign aid worker and his enterprising local girlfriend.
The Sunchaser
Michael Cimino is one of American cinema’s singular talents—and his distinct sense of landscape, colonial displacement, and male ennui is fully realized in his final work. The Sunchaser, might otherwise be rough around the edges, but nonetheless stands as one of the auteur’s most underrated films.
Natural Born Killers
Oliver Stone’s controversial comedy, which follows two mass murderers (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), remains as black as ever.
A Hard Day’s Night
It’s 1964 and four young lads from Liverpool are about to change the world. John, Paul, George, and Ringo play cheeky comic versions of themselves in a film that captured the astonishing moment when they officially became the singular, irreverent idols of their generation and changed music forever.
Heat
Robert De Niro. Al Pacino. Michael Mann. Three icons of cinemas combine for his seminal crime drama, which sees a determine cop and an equally ruthless criminal in a cat-and-mouse game in a nocturnal Los Angeles caught with cool intensity by Mann’s deep-focused camera. A modern classic.
The Fountain
A doctor’s endless search for a cure to his wife’s cancer spans centuries in Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious, divisive sci-fi, as she writes the tale of a 16th Century conquistador looking for eternal life.
Arabian Nights Vol. I
In Portugal, over 600 shipyard workers are being laid off. An apiarist fights off an invasion of foreign bees. An African wizard creates an aerosol spray that cures impotence in world leaders and IMF financiers. A judge puts a cockerel on trial for crowing too early. (Read our interview with Miguel Gomes.)
Arabian Nights Vol. II
An elderly criminal becomes a folk hero as he successfully evades hordes of police; a stern judge oversees a case involving 13 stolen cows, mail-order brides, a genie and a machete-wielding human lie detector; a Maltese poodle shuffles between households in a recession-stricken estate. (Read our interview with Miguel Gomes.)
Arabian Nights Vol. III
Scheherazade, the daughter of the grand vizier, weaves tales to please the king and stay her own execution. Realising she will soon run out of stories to tell, she hatches a plan to escape the palace. Meanwhile, finch hunters offer a musical analogy for Portugal’s 21st-century woes. (Read our interview with Miguel Gomes.)
On Body and Soul
When a man and woman who meet at work begin to know each other, they discover that they have the same dreams at night, and they decide to make them come true. Subtly moving and brutally raw, read our full review of Ildikó Enyedi’s first feature since the 90s.
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Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon
Under Electric Clouds
Available until end of: 9th December
Heat
Available until end of: 10th December
The Fountain
Available until end of: 11th December
Zigeunerweisen
Available until end of: 12th December
Arabian Nights: Volume I
Available until end of: 13th December
Arabian Nights: Volume II
Available until end of: 14th December
Arabian Nights: Volume III
Available until end of: 15th December
On Body and Soul
Available until end of: 16th December