MUBI – quick links
MUBI: new this week
Theatre of The World – 26 June
Spotlight collection. Queer, feminist, and defiantly avant-garde, Ulrike Ottinger’s ‘Berlin’ trilogy transforms Cold War-era West Berlin into a dazzling landscape of theatricality, excess, and radical imagination. Blurring fantasy, satire, and political provocation, Ottinger’s cinema revels in collisions between the grotesque and the beautiful.
Includes Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press.
MUBI: recent highlights
Crimes of the Future – 19 June
Film (2022). David Cronenberg’s provocative return to body horror imagines a near future where surgery, performance art, and human evolution merge into disturbing new forms of expression. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart.
David Cronenberg – 19 June
Spotlight collection. A descent into the unsettling cinematic universe of David Cronenberg, where flesh, technology, and psychology collide in visions of transformation and bodily unease. Across horror, satire, and speculative fiction, Cronenberg’s work persistently interrogates the unstable boundaries of the human body and mind.
Includes Crash, The Shrouds, Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection.
God Is Shy – 19 June
Film (2025). Jocelyn Charles’ poised and formally inventive debut short film, God Is Shy, opens with an apparently innocent game in which two young passengers sketch their fears during a train journey. However, the dynamic shifts when a mysterious woman intervenes, transforming the encounter into increasingly unsettling, ambiguous territory.
By blending animation with psychological horror, the film transitions seamlessly between ordinary reality and the uncanny. It employs distorted perspectives, shifting textures, and expressive sound design to externalise emotional unease. Both humorous and unsettling, God Is Shy exhibits a notable mastery of tone and atmosphere within its concise runtime.
Hot to the Touch: Female Desire on Screen – 12 June
Spotlight collection. This collection foregrounds women reclaiming desire, intimacy, and agency on screen—challenging decades of objectifying cinematic conventions. From tender romances to boundary-pushing dramas, these films explore sexuality through female subjectivity, emotional complexity, and unapologetic passion.
Includes The Handmaiden, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Sirāt – 12 June
Film (2025). Oliver Laxe’s Sirât presents a hypnotic and immersive narrative set in the deserts of North Africa, chronicling a father and son’s search for their missing daughter following her disappearance at an underground rave in Morocco. As the protagonists move from one remote gathering to the next, their quest evolves into an exploration of spiritual, existential, and ultimately unknowable dimensions.
From ScreenHub’s five-star review:
Sirât, the immaculately staged near-apocalypse from Oscar-nominated French-Galician filmmaker Óliver Laxe, has no interest in easing you in. Or out.
Instead, as the film opens, we’re thrust headlong into a juddering blast of bone-crunching bass that annihilates our senses. A fortress-like barricade of towering speakers is arrayed at the foot of a cliff, somewhere in the southern Morrocco end of the Sahara. A light show dances on this foreboding canvas as a drugged-up throng surrender themselves to the beat. Read more …
Jacques Tati – 5 June
Spotlight collection. A celebration of Jacques Tati’s timeless comic genius, where modern life becomes a choreography of visual gags, architectural absurdities, and quietly anarchic observation. Through meticulous staging and gentle satire, Tati transformed everyday behaviour into one of cinema’s great comic languages.
Includes Playtime, Mon Oncle, M. Hulot’s Holiday, Trafic, Parade.
Gloria – 5 June
Film (2013). Sebastián Lelio’s bittersweet character study follows a divorced woman embracing romance, freedom, and reinvention within Santiago’s nightlife scene, elevated by Paulina García’s radiant, award-winning performance.
Fish Tank – 5 June
Andrea Arnold’s breakthrough feature follows a volatile teenager navigating isolation, desire, and fractured family life on a British housing estate. Restless, compassionate, and anchored by Katie Jarvis’ remarkable debut performance.
