Streaming: how to make the most of Mubi's new library
Regular readers will know that Mubi is a standby in these parts: in a VOD landscape where classic and arthouse cinema is often pushed to dusty, dwindling virtual shelves, its foregrounding of such films has won the streaming service a devoted following. Key to its appeal has been its strictly curated model: 30 films available to subscribers at any one time, each live for only 30 days. That limited but tastefully assembled menu has been a refreshing alternative to the overwhelming content assault of Netflix and the like – as well as recreating the time-sensitive urgency of seeing films on their first run at the cinema. Only got a day left to watch that Godard film you’ve always wanted to see? Better hop to it, then.
Yet last week saw a significant change over at Mubi that should please subscribers who chafe against having their viewing selected and structured for them – however discerningly. Its 30-day menu remains, including such ongoing strands as this month’s Focus on Céline Sciamma and a Fellini 100 retrospective. To this, however, Mubi has now added a comprehensive Library section, containing hundreds of past curated selections, for viewers who would rather make their own way. Most of its 30-day picks, where rights permit, will transfer to the library once their time is up. This applies retrospectively too, to previous selections. The addition (currently available exclusively on the web, but coming soon to Mubi’s iOS and Android apps) is granted to all subscribers at no extra cost – so suddenly your £9.99 a month (or £7.99 a month for annual subscribers) goes rather a lot further: well-timed relief for lockdown bargain-hunters seeking to streamline their streaming costs.
The new Mubi vault ranges from essential canon titles – such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), if you’re in the mood for some enigmatic, summery melancholy, perhaps in a double bill sweetened with Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours (2008) – to lesser-seen avant garde works that can be harder to track down online. I was delighted to find The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), an exquisite hybrid documentary by Pietro Marcello that outlines the romance between a Genoese serial convict and a transgender fellow inmate with an enthralling, adventurous collage of first-hand material and archival footage of the lovers’ crumbling city.
The catalogue of recent films Mubi has itself distributed is generously showcased, many of them previously celebrated in this column: among them, Kantemir Balagov’s startling, female-oriented second world war PTSD panorama Beanpole, Alain Gomis’s rhythmic, intoxicating Kinshasa street drama Félicité and Diao Yinan’s iridescent, head-spinning Chinese crime spectacular The Wild Goose Lake.
David Robert Mitchell’s divisive but swiftly cult-amassing Los Angeles lunatic noir Under the Silver Lake is there. Better yet, so is his lovely, underseen debut The Myth of the American Sleepover, a teen film with a deep, humid understanding of its characters’ gangly sensual awareness. In that vein, if you were rightly dazzled by Eliza Hittman’s recent Never Rarely Sometimes Always, make a beeline for her exceptional 2013 debut It Felt Like Love, a tough, tactile first-lust story that makes an absorbing companion piece to her latest.
If you feel like challenging yourself, lockdown currently affords you all the spare time you might previously have had for the singular, supersized oeuvre of Filipino auteur Lav Diaz. His 625-minute rural epic Evolution of a Filipino Family (2005) delivers on its title, charting the saga of a farming clan with a mix of classical sweep and unfamiliar indigenous texture. It’s stony but engrossing: you’d be forgiven for spreading it across a couple of nights.
In a breezier mood? Vittorio De Sica’s 1964 romcom Marriage Italian-Style, with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in their roaring, red-hot prime, is as silky and rib-sticking as risotto. Let the Sunshine In (2017), Claire Denis’s lilting ode to middle-aged sexuality and the general joys of Juliette Binoche plays like a sorbet for afters. The whole library is a bit of a jumble, but that’s an extension of the Mubi charm: jump in and get self-curating.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Human Rights Watch film festival 2020
(Curzon Home Cinema)
Having had its London big-screen event shut down in March, the annual humanitarian-themed festival is running a digital edition until 5 June, with a stimulating selection of docs and narrative features. In particular, seek out Eva Mulvad’s riveting heart-tugger Love Child, tracing an Iranian refugee family’s five-year settlement struggle.
Little Women
(Sony, PG)
Greta Gerwig’s inspired, lovingly mounted adaptation of the oft-filmed novel plays even better on a second go-round, as its cleverly rebraided timeline draws fresh perspectives on storytelling and female agency from Louisa May Alcott’s text.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
(Sony, PG)
Children’s TV entertainer Fred Rogers is a very American institution: one I finally understand, thanks to Marielle Heller’s brilliant, subtly subversive blend of biopic, fiction and pop-cultural deconstruction. Matthew Rhys and Tom Hanks both excel.
