Writer-director Lukas Feigelfeld ventures all the way back to the 15th century for his slow-burn, celebrated debut—a folk horror tale told in four parts. Exploring the misogyny and fears of the medieval era, Hagazussa is a striking, sinister thriller that is both supernatural and psychological.
Discipline is no fun for teenagers, but this immersive documentary finds humor in the fascinating, decadent universe of a hotel school where boys are meticulously trained to serve. Davide Maldi’s touching rite of passage compassionately reveals how the journey to adulthood comes with a rule book.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has no fear of cinema’s many shapes and sizes, and his version of a television miniseries takes full advantage of its possibilities for storytelling. The result is a genre-bending, deeply immersive saga of a crime and a curse that follows four girls’s divergent paths into adulthood.
In Now, At Last!, Ben Rivers investigates what it’s like to live in slow-motion by capturing a day in the life of a sloth. When slowness is a way of living, every daily action, even the most mundane one, becomes amplified, strangely dramatic, and almost monumental—including taking a nap.
A masterful debut feature, Chen Jianbin’s A Fool is a stylish noir utilizing deadpan humor to satirize the greed underneath China’s income divide. Shot mostly in long takes, the performers are given room to drive the tense story, while also softening its edge with great banter and affection.
Senegalese director Moussa Touré’s third feature is a survival drama that captures—with visceral, heart-stopping force—a treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Rich with the intimate specifics of West African life, The Pirogue humanizes the people behind the crisis, tracing a journey of hope.
How else could Federico Fellini bid farewell to cinema but with a baroque, dreamlike, and nostalgic fable? Here’s a welcome restoration of this Ermanno Cavazzoni adaptation with Roberto Benigni, for which Fellini created an Italian town from scratch—a poetic vision amongst a disenchanting modernity.
Premiering at Sundance, this indie is a sensitive look at the lifecycle of an imperfect match. Director Ira Sachs based the script on his own personal relationship, but transcends the personal aspects of his experience to form a universal and resonant look at the bonds formed through a partnership.
MUBI is thrilled to unveil the restoration of this criminally overlooked adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel. A startling depiction of female consciousness with a jaw-dropping Isabelle Huppert, Werner Schroeter’s hallucinatory love triangle overflows with subconscious frenzy and fervid passions.
What if film’s most precious function were to capture the passing of time: those meaningful but unnoticed fragments of existence and geological layers of history? Filmed in sumptuous 16mm and structured in twelve chapters, Ben Rivers’ globetrotting film diary reflects on what “now” might be.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a deft practitioner of almost any genre, including martial arts! His action film is typically but compellingly strange, intertwined with the industrial development of the Japanese waterfront. The fights, when they come, have a sense of realism that is as unusual as it is bracing.
Crime isn’t only the realm of masterminds—just as entertaining are the botched plans of aspirational crooks. This series focuses on comic criminal antics from mainland China, starting with Cock and Bull, a series of interwoven tales that exquisitely blends dark humor and genre thrills.
The career of King Hu, best-known for Come Drink with Me, Dragon Inn and Touch of Zen, is full of innovation and wonder beyond these wuxia classics. This marvelous fable, shot on location in South Korea and seamlessly blending philosophy and action, has been newly restored to its original length.
Based on the shocking real-life story of Black performer Sarah Baartman, Abdellatif Kechiche (Blue is the Warmest Color) marshals a blistering critique of racism, misogyny, and the colonial gaze that turns us into complicit voyeurs. Featuring a truly remarkable debut performance from Yahima Torres.
We begin our focus on Indian experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta with a film often regarded as a critical juncture in his artistic practice. An ingenious depiction of the art and life of the 18th century eponymous Pahari painter, this meditative work unfurls like a multi-layered miniature painting.
By watching sex workers listen to their own experiences while staring at us, Blue Boy creates a provocative triangle of power relations between camera, subject, and spectator. Manuel Abramovich plunges us into the complexities of sex trade with an inventive, superbly effective storytelling device.
Ida Lupino’s first film as a director is this taboo-busting, compassionate melodrama about an unwed and unwanted pregnancy. A woman’s perspective and her intimate subjectivity refreshingly lie at the center of this drama, which highlights the era’s ludicrous, conflicting attitudes to sex and love.
Indian new wave filmmaker Kamal Swaroop’s debut feature is a postmodern portrait of day-to-day life in the town of Ajmer. Told through idiosyncratic imagery, unusual dialogues, and irreverence, this film is a cult-classic of Indian experimental cinema.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa taps into his skill with policier and horror films for this thriller cleverly blending domestic vulnerability and unsolved crime. Throw credibility out the window and embrace the film’s tingling sense of unease and the uncanny as the story twists and turns.
Palestinian director Elia Suleiman brings darkly deadpan humor, surreal poetics, static long-shots, and Keaton-esque slapstick to explore the absurdity of life under occupation. With shades of Tati, Kaurismäki and Andersson, this masterful tragicomedy won both the Jury and FIPRESCI awards at Cannes.
Shot on handheld 16mm film, this surreal western set in 1893 Colorado is equal parts bewildering, funny, and stunning. Directing duo Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn combine philosophical ruminations with expansive geological sights, resulting in a lo-fi road trip comedy that is beyond classification.
For us, a movie star is someone who we’ll watch in any movie—and if Mads Mikkelsen is in it, we’re there. Whether playing a Bond villain, a boozing school teacher (his newest film, Another Round), or embodying vengeful outrage in this historical drama, his brooding intensity is fiercely compelling.
If any movie changed the perception that Kiyoshi Kurosawa only excelled at horror films, this is it: a domestic drama—the hallowed realm of Ozu—but reinvented. A prizewinner at Cannes, he scored his biggest hit yet with an unusual blend of redemptive family story, dystopian dread, and deadpan humor.
Part of the “Father Knows Best” trilogy that propelled him into international stardom, Ang Lee made his debut with this witty and heartfelt drama. Tenderly considering cultural differences between the East and West, Pushing Hands became the first Taiwanese feature to be distributed in the U.S.
Directed by Sylvia Chang, and co-written by Ang Lee, Siao Yu frames gritty ’90s Manhattan with the sensibility of the New Taiwanese Cinema. Daniel J. Travanti and newcomer René Liu deliver powerhouse performances in this humble and extraordinarily beautiful story of immigrant life in America.
The latest film by Algerian-French auteur Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche is an engrossing drama tinged with a thriller’s suspense. Echoing Casablanca’s hero fighting to keep wartime neutrality and Transit’s clever use of an unnamed locale, Ameur-Zaïmeche vividly tells a timeless story of paramount urgency.
Director Chloé Zhao won the Golden Lion at Venice and the People’s Choice Award at TIFF for her latest film, Nomadland. Zhao’s first feature is a similarly beautiful and melancholic portrait of life on the fringes of American exploitation, impressively brought to life by its non-professional actors.
This rose-tinted but fascinating period film from I Am Not Madame Bovary director Feng Xiaogang immerses us in the artistic side of the People’s Liberation Army. Beyond dramatizing the challenges of the vocation, the film asks how the lives of young artists intersect with government ideology.
No one’s enjoying Bruno Dumont’s foray into comedy more than us. The former king of the New French Extremity has taken to slapstick like a duck to water in this darkly twisted, hysterically funny whodunnit that also works as a class satire. Plus Juliette Binoche like you’ve never seen her before!
A decidedly playful master of many genres, Kiyoshi Kurosawa collaborated again with the great actor Kôji Yakusho (Cure) in a lightly comic version of a very scary idea: one day, a man sees his exact double. Existentially terrifying, perhaps, but also… potentially advantageous? A darkly sly gem.
