15 articles

23 hours ago

In partnership with New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, Mubi will be hosting three films recently shown at Art of the Real,  the Film Society's annual showcase for boundary-pushing nonfiction films. Poet on a Business Trip will be showing April 24 - May 23, 2016 on Mubi in the United States.Director Ju Anqi. Photo by Ma Liang“Poet on a Business Trip”: I do not know how this title reads in Chinese, but in English its matter-of-fact anomaly, a title suggestive of silent film actualities and Luc Moullet’s drollness, serves well this curiously blasé, marvelously unusual film by Ju Anqi.Poet on a Business Trip looks and feels like the time capsule it in fact is: the director took Shu, a young Chinese poet, on a road trip to the barren western (and Uygur) province of Xinjiang back in 2002, during which Shu composed poems. For reasons discussed below in an interview with the filmmaker, »

- Daniel Kasman

23 April 2016 8:35 AM, PDT

Mubi is continuing its partnership with New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center to present online selections from their April festival, Art of the Real, an annual showcase of boundary-pushing nonfiction films. Past collaborations with the Film Society provided online audiences access to highlights from the New York Film Festival's Projections program and their Friends with Benefits series.We covered Art of the Real as it happened in New York, and now Mubi will exclusively be showing the following features direct from the festival:Poet on a Business Trip (Ju Anqui, China), 24 April in the USOriginally shot back in September of 2002, this lo-fi, black-and-white adventure across China’s remote Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is both bawdy and astute. First seen mid-coitus in Beijing, the titular scribe Shu decides to go on a “business trip”—which consists of drinking, eating, and chewing the fat with truck drivers and fellow bus passengers in seedy barbecue joints and hotels. »

- Notebook

23 April 2016 8:33 AM, PDT

Mubi is showing Jacques Rivette's Out 1: noli me tangere (1971) in four parts in the UK and most other parts of the world, beginning April 25, 2016.“How strange, it’s like being in a cloak and dagger story.”—Frédérique, Out 1“Is this a game?”“It’s lots of things.”—Sarah and Thomas, Out 1The word is casual. The world, too. In Jacques Rivette’s seminally bizarre, alluringly demanding twelve-hour-plus opus Out 1 (1971), listless Parisians float into one another’s lives as if they live in an incestuously tiny village. They come, they go, they never quite collide. They drift: their stories, if they can be called that, don’t so much intertwine with dramatic intricacy as overlap prettily like translucent jellyfish. Outward, inward, engines in decline. Eventually, of course, drifting accumulates its own tensions, acquires its own charms. Little things begin to matter, take on revelatory qualities. Hopes for a bigger »

- Michael Pattison

23 April 2016 8:20 AM, PDT

Mubi is showing Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana April 21 - May 20, 2016 in the United States.Fata MorganaI have a bone to pick with conventional wisdom about the films of Werner Herzog. You will often hear it said in a film class or a Herzog article that his body of work, which is acclaimed equally for fiction and documentary films, “blurs the line” between those two storytelling poles. To my knowledge, no filmmaker with as regarded a name as Herzog’s has such a voluminous body of work within the fiction and documentary bounds. Countless filmmakers have reached heights in both, but few have done it as consistently and repeatedly. Making Herzog rarer still are his other films (or sometimes just scenes in his films) which cast aspersions on this kind of talk that separates documentary and fiction as opposites meant to be mixed. The experimental works, of which the beguiling »

- Nate Fisher

22 April 2016 11:30 AM, PDT

Now playing exclusively on Mubi, Androids Dream is a piece of minimalist sci-fi filmed in an eerily empty, out-of-season Benidorm, on the eastern coast of Spain. Based very loosely on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the source, of course, for Blade Runner), Ion de Sosa’s short feature conjures up a future world out of contemporary architecture in much the same way as Godard’s Alphaville and Fassbinder’s World on a Wire. The poster for the film was designed by David Uzquiza, a Spanish designer based in London who works primarily in fashion publications. As a friend of De Sosa’s he was asked to design the titles and the key art for the film, and he came up with a number of designs which you can see below. The final poster uses an illustration with an interesting provenance that appears within Androids Dream. »

- Adrian Curry

22 April 2016 8:20 AM, PDT

The Festival de Cannes has announced the lineup for the official selection, including the Competition and Un Certain Regard sections, as well as special screenings, for the 69th edition of the festival:COMPETITIONOpening Night: Café Society (Woody Allen) [Out of Competition]Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)Julieta (Pedro Almodóvar)American Honey (Andrea Arnold)Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)La Fille Inconnue (Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne)Juste La Fin du Monde (Xavier Dolan)Ma Loute (Bruno Dumont)Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)Rester Vertical (Alain Guiraudie)Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)Mal de Pierres (Nicole Garcia)I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach)Ma' Rosa (Brillante Mendoza)Bacalaureat (Cristian Mungiu)Loving (Jeff Nichols)Agassi (Park Chan-Wook)The Last Face (Sean Penn)Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu)Elle (Paul Verhoeven)The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding-Refn)The Salesman (Asgha Farhadi)Un Certain REGARDOpening Film: Clash (Mohamed Diab)Varoonegi (Behnam Behzadi)Apprentice (Boo Junfeng)Voir du Pays (Delphine Coulin & Muriel Coulin)La Danseuse (Stéphanie Di Giusto)La »

- Notebook

21 April 2016 10:07 AM, PDT

Widely and rightly regarded as not only one of the finest martial arts films ever made, but one of the greatest works in of all Chinese cinema, King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (Xia nü, 1971) is most often lauded for its extraordinary fight sequences. Why the film is so exceptional, however, is that as great as these fight scenes are (and they are spectacular), they may not even be the best part of the movie. With 180 minutes to work with in its complete uncut version, which will screen in a new 4K restoration at Film Forum April 22 through May 5, Hu launches A Touch of Zen above most of its genre, above even his own impressive output, amplifying the essentials of the martial arts film while infusing it with other cinematic ingredients. The first shot of A Touch of Zen is of a spider moving in on its cobweb-entangled prey. »

- Jeremy Carr

21 April 2016 6:43 AM, PDT

Peter GreenawayThe 1928 silent dramatization of the Russian revolution wasn’t easily swallowed upon its domestic release. Sergei Eisenstein had been commissioned to make the epic after his 1925 epic Battleship Potemkin caused a sensation, often cited as virtually inventing what we now call “montage” editing. But his resulting film, October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1928), attracted the ire of fierce Soviet powers. Where he had earlier excelled with a lush, sweeping visionary narrative far beyond his years, the director’s experimental style was now seen as unintelligible to mainstream audiences and vaguely pretentious.  Like many great and underappreciated talents after him, Eisenstein was forced into a series of edits, but he was always destined for trouble under Stalin’s rule. He was a genius of his craft, and certainly no mere propagandist. So how in blazing history did a Russian auteur find himself in bed with another man in Mexico, »

- Ben Rylan

20 April 2016 6:13 AM, PDT

 Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSOf course, the biggest news in the film world over the last week has been the repeated announcements of the films included in the various festivals in Cannes this May, from the Official Selection (films by Almodóvar, Maren Ade, the Dardennes, Paul Verhoeven, and Sean Penn) and the Directors' Fortnight (Paul Schrader, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Marco Bellocchio), to Critics' Week (Oliver Laxe and Chloë Sevigny) and the increasingly higher profile Acid (including Damien Manivel's follow-up to A Young Poet, which is currently playing exclusively on Mubi in the Us).Speaking of festivals, many South Korean filmmakers will be boycotting the major Asian festival of Busan, due to interference with the organization from the city government.On a lighter note, the Loch Ness Monster has been found! Actually, no: that's no monster, »

- Notebook

19 April 2016 10:33 AM, PDT

Partycrashers is an on-going series of video dispatches from critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young.From a sun-raked rooftop in Downtown, Los Angeles (capital-d and comma deliberate) we survey the scene: bluntly domineering skyscrapers of the 'Business Improvement District' behind us in space; Palm Springs' genial American Documentary Film Festival a few days behind us in time; Michael Mann's Heat (1995) neon-fresh in our memories, the ultimate Los Angeles film (discuss) having pre-loaded the mega-metropolis into our impressionable cinema-contoured consciousnesses before either of us had ever set foot in the place.The city plays itself: concrete intersections of memories, films, architecture, roads, people. A place to ponder and (though you have been assured myriad times to the contrary) to walk: the day before recording, we'd clocked 22 miles on foot between Downtown and the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica. A trek rounding off a week's semi-haphazard perambulations that had encompassed not »

- Neil Young

19 April 2016 3:42 AM, PDT

The lineup for the 2016 Directors' Fortnight at Cannes has been announced.

Feature Films:Opening Film: Sweet Dreams (Marco Bellocchio)Divines (Houda Benyamina)L'Économie du couple (Joachim Lafosse)L'Effet aquatique (Sólveig Anspach)Like Crazy (Paolo Virzì)Les Vies de Thérèse (Sébastien Lifshitz)Ma vie de courgette (Clause Barras)Mean Dreams (Nathan Morlando)Mercenaire (Sacha Wolff)Neruda (Pablo Larraín)Endless Poetry (Alejandro Jodorowsky)Raman Raghav 2.0 (Anurag Kashyap)Risk (Laura Poitras)Tour de France (Rachid Djaïdani)Two Lovers and a Bear (Kim Nguyen)Wolf and Sheep (Shahrbanoo Sadat)Closing Film: Dog Eat Dog (Paul Schrader)

Shorts:Abigail (Isabel Penoni & Valentina Homem)Chasse Royale (Romane Gueret & Lise Akoka)Decorado (Alberto Vazquez)Habat Shel Hakala (Tamar Rudoy)Happy End (Jan Saska)Hitchhiker (Jero Yun)Import (Ena Sendijarevic)Kindil el Bahr (Damien Ounouri)Léthé (Dea Kulumbegashvili)Listening to Beethoven (Garri Bardine)Zvir (Miroslav Sikavica) »

- Notebook

19 April 2016 2:40 AM, PDT

Tony Conrad, 1983. Photo by Joe Gibbons.Tony Conrad, who passed away on April 9 aged 76, was a vital figure in the fields of both filmmaking and music. His work in each is often characterized by its visceral power, its clear-eyed critique of Western art traditions, its interest in social questions and relations of control, its technical virtuosity and wit.Conrad was an indisputable innovator. His film works, beginning with The Flicker (1966) and continuing through, the Yellow Movies (1973), Film Feedback (1974), the ‘cooked film’ and ‘pickled film’ series, and many others, pushing the medium to its inner and outer limits: exploring the potential of long durations, stroboscopic effects, the physical properties of celluloid, the relation of filmmaker to spectator, the relation of film to other arts and to history. Conrad also created a vast number of video works, reflecting the same incisive energy. Too seldom referred to in contemporary writing about experimental film, »

- Yusef Sayed

18 April 2016 8:38 AM, PDT

These gorgeous posters—a Movie Poster of the Week exclusive premiere—for King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (1971) and Dragon Inn (1967) were drawn by comic book artist Greg Ruth. Hu’s wuxia masterpieces have been digitally restored and will soon be re-released by Janus Films, with A Touch of Zen opening at Film Forum next Friday and Dragon Inn opening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on May 6. Ruth is a prolific and talented graphic artist, best known for his books Freaks of the Heartland and The Lost Boy, who has most recently collaborated with Ethan Hawke on Indeh, a graphic novel about the Apache wars. He has made a few movie poster screen prints in the past—for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Godfather II and is in the middle of Visible/Invisible, a series of limited-edition, large format »

- Adrian Curry

18 April 2016 7:01 AM, PDT

Mubi is celebrating Canadian National Film Day, in partnership with Reel Canada, by exclusively showing Atom Egoyan's Calendar (1993). It is playing on Mubi from April 20 - May 19, 2016. Many thanks to the director, who generously has shared this new introduction to his film.Calendar. Photo © Ego Film Arts.It started with a very simple urge: to go there.  Though both my parents are Armenian, I was born in Cairo, raised in Canada, and had never visited my “mother country.”   In 1991 my fourth feature, The Adjuster, had been invited to the Moscow Film Festival.  It won a prize, which included one million rubles (a fortune back then) to make a film somewhere in the Soviet Union.  At the time, Armenia was part of the Soviet Union, and this would be my opportunity to go there.Over the next year, as I began to formulate an idea for a film, fate would work against me. »

- Atom Egoyan

18 April 2016 6:41 AM, PDT

The lineup for the 2016 Cannes Critics' Week has been announced.Opening FilmIn Bed with Victoria (Justine Triet): Victoria Spick, a criminal lawyer in a total sentimental void, meets at a wedding her friend Vincent and Sam, a former drug dealer she got out business. The next day, Vincent is accused of attempted murder by his girlfriend. The victim's dog is the only witness. Reluctantly, Victoria accepts to defend Vincent, while she hires Sam as an au pair. This is just the beginning of troubled times for Victoria.CompetitionAlbüm (Mehmet Can Mertoğlu): A couple in their late 30’s sets out to prepare a fake photo album of a pseudo pregnancy period in order to prove their biological tie to the baby they’re planning adopt.Diamond Island (Davy Chou): Bora, an 18-year-old, leaves his village to work on the construction sites of Diamond Island, a project for an »

- Notebook

15 articles

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