Watch the trailer for Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box (La caja) ahead of the film’s stateside release via Mubi. The film focuses on an adolescent boy named Hatzín (non-professional, first-time actor Hatzín Navarrete) from Mexico City, whose father’s corpse was recently discovered amid a mass grave in the country’s vast northern territory. On his way back to the capital after identifying the remains, he is shocked when he comes across a man who bears a striking resemblance to his dad. The boy quickly enmeshes himself in the man’s life—who denies any possible paternal relation—increasingly convinced that the body in […]

South Korean director Park Chan-wook returns six years after The Handmaiden with Decision to Leave, a romantic thriller that won him the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. A new trailer has been released ahead of the film’s forthcoming screening at the New York Film Festival. Thought plot details are best kept sparse, the trailer hints at palpable chemistry between a detective and a recently-widowed woman. When investigating the death of a man who has fallen off of a mountain, said detective (Park Hae-Il) decides to question the deceased’s “young, beautiful and foreign” wife (Tang […]

MUBI has released a new trailer for The African Desperate, the feature debut from acclaimed visual artist Martine Syms. Filmmaker previously interviewed Syms during the film’s premiere at this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films as well as for our most recent Summer print issue. The African Desperate follows Palace Bryant (Sym’s frequent collaborator Diamond Stingily) on her final day at an MFA program in New York’s Hudson Valley. During these last 24 hours of art school, Palace experiences the full gamut of grad school woes and (synthetic) wonders—including a racist final thesis review, encounters with her insufferable classmates and […]

The following interview originally ran as coverage of the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2022 First Look festival. The Balcony Movie will screen at MoMI this weekend as part of their series In the Neighborhood: The Films of Paweł Łoziński, running from December 2-4. It is also currently playing on MUBI.—Editor As its title implies, Paweł Łoziński’s The Balcony Movie, which closes this year’s First Look Festival on March 20, is a film shot entirely from a balcony. Which may sound like the worst elevator pitch of all time until one realizes that the balcony belongs to the acclaimed Polish […]

One of the final scenes of director Michael M. Bilandic’s fourth feature, Project Space 13, involves a delusional Manhattan gallerist wearing yellow knockoff Balenciaga sneakers and a ridiculous polka-dotted blazer at the shoreline of his beach house. He’s talking on the phone, via Airpods of course, to one of the two private security guards hired to protect the solo exhibition of an equally delusional artist named Nate in the midst of lockdown and protests. Throughout the night, every storefront on the downtown block has been looted except the eponymous white cube, where the artist and armed guards have been sitting […]

Yesterday, the SVOD service MUBI announced its foray into theatrical distribution with the acquisition of Miguel Gomes’ much lauded Cannes triptych Arabian Nights. The move, in line with the recent trajectories of larger services such as Netflix and Amazon, points toward the ever expanding influence of online platforms. Filmmaker spoke to MUBI CEO Efe Cakarel about partnering with New Wave Films to distribute what some might term a challenging title, given its six hour runtime. Filmmaker: There seems to be yet another paradigm shift happening in independent distribution, with online services, formerly an alternative to theatrical exhibition, now entering that very arena. Why did you […]