MUBI has released a new trailer for the 25th anniversary 4K restoration of Lars von Trier‘s dark comedy The Idiots. The only film that von Trier made under the Dogme 95 “Vow of Chastity” (and the second official Dogme film, or Dogme #2), The Idiots centers on a commune in the Danish suburbs where members aim to disrupt wider “bourgeoisie” society by pretending to have mental and physical ailments in public. It is the second film in von Trier’s Golden Heart Trilogy, preceded by Breaking the Waves and followed by Dancer in the Dark. The Idiots will open theatrically at […]

Unclenching the Fists, the sophomore feature from Russian director Kira Kovalenko, is set in Mizur, a small mining town in North Ossetia, one of seven autonomous republics in the perpetually unsettled constellation that is the North Caucasus. The liminal setting—at once vertiginous and cramped, as though a town sprouted up from the bottom of an avalanche—is key to the film’s moods, swinging from yearning to resignation and back. We root for the film’s young central character, Ada, played by Milana Aguzarova in a remarkable debut, to free herself from these shadows upon shadows—her brute father, her lapdog brother, a pile-up […]

After world premiering at Sundance earlier this year, a teaser trailer has dropped for director Ira Sachs’s Passages. Co-written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, the film will arrive in theaters later this summer. An official synopsis reads: After completing his latest project, filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) impulsively begins a heated love affair with a young schoolteacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). For Tomas, the novelty of being with a woman is an exciting experience that he is eager to explore despite his marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw). But when Martin begins his own affair, the mercurial Tomas refocuses his attentions on his […]

MUBI has released the trailer for The Five Devils, French filmmaker Léa Mysius’s sophomore feature following her 2017 debut Ava. The film stars Adèle Exarchopolous as a woman whose daughter Vicky (Sally Dramé) possesses an unusual magical quality. The Five Devils had its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it screened in the Director’s Fortnight section. The film’s official synopsis reads: Vicky, a strange and solitary little girl, has a magical gift: she can reproduce any scent she likes, and collects them in a series of carefully labeled jars. She has secretly captured the scent of Joanne, […]

Watch the trailer for Spanish director Carla Simón’s Alcarràs, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale (the first Catalan-language film in the festival’s 72-year history to do so) and is now Spain’s official Oscar selection for Best International Feature. The film is a follow-up to Simón’s 2017 semi-autobiographical feature debut Summer 1993. Alcarràs follows a rural family living in present-day Catalonia that must grapple with the changing landscape of their collective livelihood. The cast predominantly features non-actors from the Lleida region, which includes the titular village of Alcarràs. Per the official synopsis: “As far as they can remember, the Solé family […]

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 […]