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 cop film antithetical to its Hollywood counterparts, Tavernier’s great mid-90s genre film showcases the lessons of street-level realism inherited from the French New Wave. No nonsense—inspired by the drug use of Tavernier’s son and co-written by a police vet—and all the more gripping for it.
Bertrand Tavernier’s cinema practices an innate understanding of recreating history and Let Joy Reign Supreme is no exception. Blending a colorful sense of French history with razor-sharp satire and a perfectly pitched cast, this is a lively journey into a society at the threshold of collapse.
Innovative Spanish director Pere Portabella’s “documentary” is one of the most unique and experimental horror films ever made—a horror film about the making of a horror film! In its sneaky, clandestine production, it also stands out as a key work pushing Spanish cinema against the Franco regime.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s sensitive and moving drama is quiet but exquisitely observed, blossoming with observations at once about the intimacy, challenges and dynamics of family life and of the French film industry. The father is based on Humbert Balsan, who produced Claire Denis, Von Trier and more.
A beguilingly shape-shifting film, Pietro Marcello’s documentary began as a portrait of the groundkeeper of an Italian palace until his subject’s untimely death transformed this project into something more fable-like and phantasmagoric. A nonfiction movie that goes beyond one’s expectations.
A powerhouse debut with an ambitious subject—the throes of European capitalism—dramatized with practical and engrossing storytelling. We see a labor dispute in all its detail of passion and conflict—drama that attracts drama, and even a song! A tremendous evocation of the struggle to work and live.
Our series devoted to Angela Schanelec continues with this sun-drenched snapshot of a subtly distraught summer holiday shared between lakeside neighbors. The film generously lets us piece together relationships, family drama and love’s hurt through oblique observation and heart-felt restraint.
Bertrand Blier is a talent largely undiscovered by Western audiences despite his Academy Award winning 1978 film, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. He followed with Buffet froid, a satire which uniquely mixes the crime film with black comedy for deliriously heightened sense of tone, style, and rhythm.
We close the first part of our series of underground Chinese documentaries with one of the most stunning-looking films to come out of the country, regardless of budget. A big canvas tale of ghost cities and environmental devastation, it uses Dante’s “Divine Comedy” to structure an vision.
The filmmaking duo behind the acclaimed What Now, Remind Me?, followed up that success with this gorgeous and calming anthropological portrait of a fishing village at war with encroaching industry. Fish Tail is study in a people’s perseverance and has a rare, tangible connection with its subjects.
“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
Our Hong Sang-soo double bill concludes with this wickedly conceptual comedy of melancholy and life choices. Perfectly divided in a bifurcated structure of two dueling narratives of varying possibilities, chance, and outcome, all of Hong’s storytelling gambits pay off in this Golden Leopard winner.
In a new double bill, we welcome you to the delightful (and perversely) surreal world of Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo. This sojourn to France is a modestly quotidian epic and one of his best, a New Wave homage to Parisian flâneurs told in Hong’s style of mysterious coincidence and comic awkwardness.
While trying to grasp the mysterious nature of a world ruled by chance with impressive formal precision, Marseille oozes with serene ambiguity revealing the elusive, almost ethereal soul of Angela Schanelec’s work. Read the diary of her first visit to the eponymous city in preparation for the film.
Alain Corneau is best known in recent years for having his final film Love Crime, later remade by Brian De Palma. Before this, Corneau’s eclectic cinematic project took to India with this forlorn psychological examination of male friendship gone awry. A frequently startling venture into melancholy.
Its title may be impossible to remember, but its images are impossible to forget. Gastón Solnicki’s third feature boasts a magnetic, drifting beauty as it navigates privilege in an exquisite choreography of bodies and spaces that feels at once meticulously orchestrated and remarkably alive.
Today is the birthday of one of cinema’s founding fathers and we celebrate with this biographical essay film on Eadweard Muybridge. Teacher and director Thom Andersen’s literally re-animates Muybridge’s trailblazing experiments in motion studies while confronting his anguished personal life.
The tragic story of Christine Chubbuck was recently realized in traditional narrative form with Christine. Filmmaker Robert Greene, together with a virtuoso Kate Lyn Sheil, took the opposite approach with this dizzying journey into one of the most infamous moments in American broadcast history.
We’re proud to partner with the Fashion in Film Festival to present The Inferno Unseen, a newly mastered cut of Clouzot’s legendary rushes at the Museum of the Moving Image. The story of this footage is told in this fascinating doc about a film that could have changed cinema, but was never finished.
A stunning debut by dancer and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, Ma takes the Virgin Mary and radically re-imagines her in a contemporary and dialog-free story of archetypal relationships and movement through an American landscape of desert, motels and Las Vegas. Unconventional and risk-taking.
MUBI is proud to present a retrospective of one of the most important and beguiling, yet under-seen contemporary directors: Angela Schanelec. We begin with this tenderly enigmatic drama that reveals a group of friends, family and lovers dispersed yet connected as people yearning for fulfillment.
An adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s classic suspense novel, as well as drawing unique influence from the likes of Dirty Harry and other classic American crime thrillers, Police Python 357 proves that France’s Second Wave could do genre too—and perhaps even with greater skill than their predecessors.
Shot across three continents—and divided in three parts interlinked in unexpected ways—Eduardo Williams’ enigmatic feature debut takes us on a visceral journey to explore the ominous hyper-connectivity of today’s world. One of the most accomplished and refreshing films of recent years.
A zenith of new Chinese cinema, Xu Xin’s doc confronts the tragic fire that forever altered life in the village of Karamay. Banned in its home country to this day, the scope of this film’s length is carried by its will to listen to the victims’ families with a rare, enveloping patience. Essential.
We round out Philippe Garrel’s three most recent films—each akin to a brisk novella and gorgeously shot on black and white 35mm—with this light drama of love and doubled infidelity. A portrait of a complicated adult relationship between a brooding Stanislas Merhar and an incredible Clotilde Coureau.
We’re proud to follow our 2017 retrospective of Philippe Garrel with the auteur’s new film! A lithe romantic triangle, Garrel only needs the barest means—plus black & white 35mm—to tell a lovely story of two young women (one played by his daughter, Esther) trying to find what love means to them.
Following our MUBI retrospective of the great auteur Philippe Garrel, we now showcase his three beautiful recent films, a thematic trilogy of love that soulfully explores the challenges and joys of the most tender of emotions. The filmmaker’s own son stars in this delicate exploration of jealousy.
Chinese Independents continues with this document of poverty in modern Beijing. Much like the previous films in the series, this is shot on a consumer video camera in the name of breaking all barriers of style in exchange for an intimate proximity with the resilience of its subjects.
A rigorously shaped essayistic journey into the culture of war, Battles carves an observational argument from closely studying the societal scars of conflict. Isabelle Tollenaere’s debut bravely interrogates the oft unnoticed grip war still has on modern life in Albania, Belgium, Russia, and Latvia.