Master auteur Kathryn Bigelow has crafted some of the most purely sensorial and kinetic genre cinema of our time. Exhibit A: Near Dark, her sophomore film, is a bewitching vampire-action-horror hybrid that descends into the hidden worlds of rural America to find hell. Erotic, violent, and essential.
We lanceren onze samenwerking met My French Film Festival met een spotlight op nieuwe Franse cinema én Quentin Dupieux’ absurde nieuwe komedie. Keep an Eye Out plaatst slapstick en een ingenieuze dialoog in een politie-ondervraging met een chaotisch, hilarisch en reinigend effect.
In celebration of Muhammad Ali’s birthday, we offer a refreshing documentary portrait of the eternal champ. Differing itself from other similar docs, Facing Ali switches things up by offering interviews with 10 of Ali’s past rivals to compose a one-of-a-kind, heartfelt tribute to The Greatest.
Concluding our Jean Rouch series is this lively portrait of a young woman navigating the constant advances of men on the streets of Paris. An incisive look at what it means to be a woman in public spaces, The Punishment is realized with a colorful and, sadly, all too accurate sense of realism.
With Faraway Roots Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd and his camera venture to Mauritania to immerse us in the stories, spirituality, and rituals of the land and its people. A dreamlike wandering of a country rarely seen by cinema—this is a wisely impressionistic portrait of place and its forgotten dwellers.
MUBI is proud to introduce an exciting and unique voice in new documentary cinema, Pierre-Yves Vanderweerd. This Belgian filmmaker departs from staid convention and boldly embraces the poetic and sensorial possibilities of evoking the lives of lost peoples, their outer landscapes and inner beings.
In-between breathtaking moments of knee-jerk violence and oddly cathartic brutality, Nicolas Winding Refn delivers an unhurried and evocative visceral allegory of a Norse warrior (Mads Mikkelsen) surviving heaven, hell, and the 11th century. A sublime, caustic journey into the depths of cruelty.
This week’s double bill is of psychotropic visions from two of modern cinema’s most divisive auteurs. Gaspar Noé’s Tokyo-set audio-visual experience is stunning—a hallucinatory, first-person crawl through the metropolis by night. Enter the Void is cinema at its most phenomenal and visceral.
We’re big fans of the “Greek Weird Wave,” and while figurehead Yorgos Lanthimos has decamped to England, there is still plenty perversely amiss in Greece. Makridis’s savage Sundance competitor is exemplary: its black humor, social critique, and clever, sun-drenched imagery are a wry provocation.
We continue our retrospective of newly restored ethnographies by the trailblazing Jean Rouch with a film that characteristically upends your expectations for what a normal documentary should do. Here his Nigerian protagonists reverse the filmmaking perspective, exploring the peculiarities of France!
French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa’s second feature is a flamboyant spectacle: a mix of thriller, comedy and melodrama overflowing with queer effervescence. Calling Fassbinder to mind, its 70s atmosphere and cult aura render an impossibly eccentric take on Europe’s political unrest and moral decay.
“Deze schat uit de schroothoop was wederom een geluksgeval uit een gesloten filmlab. Het originele 35mm negatief is liefdevol gerestaureerd door het team van de NSW. De achtergrondmuziek is afkomstig van lp’s, maar het oppervlaktegeluid bevat dezelfde ruis als toen in 1965.”—NWR
This is a masterpiece of director Jean Rouch’s “ethofictions,” films that influentially blurred the line between researched documentaries and improvisational fictions. Collaborating with his actors to shape their stories, this is a deeply observational yet brilliantly playful saga of migration.
In the event of his marvelous new film Support the Girls making waves this awards season, we revisit Mumblecore pioneer Andrew Bujalski’s awkwardly charming debut Funny Ha Ha. A perceptive, hysterically laugh-and wince-inducing comedy about a young woman’s post-graduate arrested development.
Alfonso Cuarón’s excellence became crystal clear with his fourth feature, Y tu mamá también. The birthplace of both Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal’s stardom, this deceptively sublime road movie broke ground by expressing the many complexities intrinsic to the sexual odyssey that is youth.
This year we’re excited to launch “What Is An Auteur?,” a new series of double bills dedicated to exploring what defines the style, sensibility and perspective of directors. With Roma being one of last year’s true masterpieces, we’re starting with Alfonso Cuarón and his satiric, sexy Mexican debut.
Set on the Niger-Mali border, Rouch’s The Lion Hunters focuses on sub-Saharan hunters and the many nuances of their craft while they prepare for and embark upon an expedition. A virtuous document of a bygone tradition, Rouch once again honors and expresses a culture not yet equipped with cinema.
Our Jean Rouch season continues, this time with a portrait of the man himself. Composed of interviews with past collaborators and subjects this doc puts cinema’s innovator of ethnography in front of the camera’s gaze as his restless artistic project receives both celebration and confrontation.
A zenith in feature film animation, Eiichi Yamamoto’s masterpiece took six years to make and went unseen in the West until this resplendent restoration appeared. Doused in satanism, witchcraft, and born of the sexual revolution, this dark tale of a woman’s vengeance is not for the faint of heart.
The turbulent grounds of post-war Germany set the stage for this thriller amidst a politically divided Berlin. In many ways a companion piece to The Third Man, this underestimated game of deception (starring James Mason!) is a masterful realization of a city as chessboard of escape and pursuit.
In honor of director Carol Reed’s birthday we’re showing his most beloved film and arguably the greatest British film ever made, alongside a lesser known gem to discover. But start with this post-war noir classic adapted from Graham Greene: It’s both a gripping mystery and an exposé of modern evil.
Following the sublime Three Times, we offer a documentary portrait providing context of both director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s artistry and a thorough perspective on the landmark New Taiwan Cinema to which he belonged. An essential document of one of 20th century cinema’s most significant chapters.
Our “Behind the Viewfinder” series continues with the star of New Taiwanese Cinema, Hou Hsiou-hsien. This triptych of stories of a single couple’s love—and heartbreak—across three eras of his country’s history showcases the director’s effortless evocation of the sublimity of every living moment.
A true masterpiece, Jean Rouch’s utterly unique and boundary-breaking film cross-blends reality with fiction to explore the nature of race relations in the Ivory Coast. Deeply collaborating with his participants, Rouch’s influence on the French New Wave can be seen in this energetic, youthful film.
Before Godard could make his first jump cut in Breathless, Jean Rouch led the way with this freeform jaunt with Nigerian immigrants as they depart from home. A landmark experiment in collaboration, the subjects claim part control of their representation with an incredible, improvised voiceover.
It’s Christmas and like us, wherever you are you may be dreaming of the snow. Thus we revive one of our favorite films of the year, a tale of the profound loveliness of a winter landscape, the kind that draws you out to explore and play. Better still, it’s also about the longing to be with family.
On the occasion of his 96th birthday, we’re honored to present one of the finest films from a peerless pioneer of avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas. His relentless oeuvre confirms the “home movie” as an art form—naturally, Reminiscences is one of the finest examples of intimacy ever put on celluloid.
Our Song wisely trades the usual busy narrative of a coming-of-age story for a relaxed, naturalistic take set in pre-gentrified Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This compassionate indie immerses you in the interior worlds and rapturous friendships of three young women at the precipice of adulthood.
In honor of the birthday of Jean-Michel Basquiat—if he hadn’t died tragically young, he would have only been 58—we’re presenting Tamra Davis’s essential documentary on this uncompromising visionary and one of the greatest artists of his century. Davis was a friend and that intimacy shines through.
In the pâtisserie of French cinema, comedies don’t come more leisurely than this hit farce, which remixes Breakfast at Tiffany’s into a riviera caper and lets Audrey Tautou play naughty. It reminds us of nothing so much as the fluffy escapism of 30s screwball comedies—god knows we need them.