David Farnor | On 09, Mar 2019

MUBI is counting down to its release of Under the Silver Lake this week, with a series of films examining the way Los Angeles has been depicted in cinema, from John Carpenter dystopia and Nicolas Winding Refn thriller to David Robert Mitchell’s new noir-tinged mystery. And, before Under the Silver Lake hits the big screen, you can get your theatrical fix with MUBI Go (which offers a free cinema ticket every week to its subscribers) and see Border 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: Detour – 9th March

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 – 10th March

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.

Kazuhiroo Soda: Peace – 11th March

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.

Luis Buñuel: Diary of a Chambermaid – 12th March

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).

MUBI Exclusive: Under the Silver Lake – 15th March

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.

 

Other new releases on MUBI

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wim Wenders: Lisbon Story

MUBI’s Wim Wenders retrospective concludes with the tale of a German sound engineer, played by Wenders’ habitué Rüdiger Vogler, embarking on aimless travels around Lisbon. A self-referential musing about cinema and the (difficult) art of filmmaking—including a monologue by Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.

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: 21 Grams

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s follow-up to 21 Grams follows three people whose lives and fate come together in a car crash. Academic Paul suffers from a fatal heart disease and is waiting for a transplant; Christina, a former drug addict, now leads a calm life with husband and children; Jack, a hot tempered ex-con, seeks redemption in religion. Both Both Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro received deserved Oscar nominations for their roles.

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: The Virgin Spring

Christians Töre and Märeta send their daughter, the virginal Karin, and their foster daughter Ingeri, to deliver candles to a church. On the way, the girls meet three goat herders who brutally rape and murder Karin. When the killers seek refuge in their family’s farm, Töre plots a fitting revenge.

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

Awards 2019: A Foreign Affair

Congresswoman Phoebe Frost travels to postwar Berlin to investigate reports that an American officer may be protecting cabaret singer Erika von Schlütow, the former mistress of a leading Nazi. Miss Frost falls for her military escort Captain Pringle, unaware that he is in fact the singer’s paramour.

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.

Wim Wenders: Tokyo-Ga

German director Wim Wenders travels to Japan to explore the world of one his “masters” in cinema, Japanese celebrated film director Yasujiro Ozu. Sequences of Wenders’ view of Japan alternates with encounters and interviews with crew and cast-members of Ozu’s films.

 

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

 

Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon

Central Airport THF
Available until end of: 9th March

Paris, Texas
Available until end of: 10th March

Fish Tank
Available until end of: 11th March

Pendular
Available until end of: 12th March

Claire’s Camera
Available until end of: 13th March

Victory Day
Available until end of: 14th March

Submarine
Available until end of: 15th March

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

 

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