WELCOME TO MUBI

Working with unseen outtakes from a 1969 French TV interview, director Alain Gomis fashions a riveting, sharp-edged essay on the media’s treatment of a genius of jazz piano, Thelonious Monk. Hypnotic, nerve-wrangling, and immersive, Rewind and Play lets the music—and the silence—do the talking.

Reclaiming a piece of queer history, Tzor Edery and Tom Prezman’s animated short movingly resurrects a forgotten gay bar from its tragic fate under the Nazi occupation of France. Awash with voluptuous imagery, this is a vital ode to the radical joy that dares to flourish in the face of intolerance.

One of the first films from mainland China to explicitly portray queer life, Zhang Yuan’s pioneering marvel bristles with the heady push and pull between lust and repression. As the setting shifts from a cruising hotspot to an integration room, what begins as a confession soon ignites a carnal fire.

Under the spell of dance, a drab public toilet transforms into an altar of ecstatic, revolutionary desire in Nans Laborde-Jourdà’s kinetic short, winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes. Using Maurice Ravel’s best-known composition as a call for erotic and personal liberation, Boléro lets the body talk.

In one of the most extraordinary film performances in modern cinema, Adèle Exarchopoulos soars as a young woman exploring her sexuality in this masterful coming-of-age chronicle. Winner of the 2013 Palme d’Or for Kechiche and, in a Cannes Film Festival first, Exarchopoulos and co-star Léa Seydoux.

Three lovers spin in a vortex of pent-up desire and resentment in Ira Sachs’ fresh, honest and acerbically funny take on messy, modern relationships. Just like its dynamic leads—Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Ben Whishaw—this refreshingly fluid relationship drama simply oozes sex appeal.