I always try to gift myself a Mubi subscription and make the most of it when I can. They’ve got so many unique and wonderful films that open your eyes to a whole different world and culture out there that they can sometimes leave you feeling a whole range of emotions. It’s up there with being one of the best streaming platforms available, although I think a few tweaks on their interface would help massively if they were to implement them (user profiles would be a start!).

As I go through watching some of their curation I’ll share (and update this page on a regular basis) what I think are their best movies on the platform, although some of these films may have left their service due to expired rights by the time you check them out (so you’ll have to find them elsewhere).

---

The Girl with the Needle (2024)

Hypnotic and mesmerising are the adjectives I’ll use to describe this Danish masterpiece of a film. Magnus von Horn’s masterful direction, and Michał Dymek’s haunting and vivid cinematography, transport you into the gothic landscape of Poland in the year 1919 (during and after World War I). You’re immersed into the gritty slums, tenements, and back alleyways of a time when life was unforgiving; it’s a real eye-opener to how brutal working class life really was. It is the celluloid embodiment of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

The protagonist, Karolina (Vic Carmen Sonne), works as a seamstress in a factory and faces even more hardship when she’s evicted from her apartment. It’s here that her life takes a few surprising turns before she finally befriends an older woman, aiding her in a clandestine orphanage. It’s a film that takes you on a journey into the unknown; where an undercurrent of doom is hanging precariously above our protagonist, like a dark cloud just waiting to rain down unimaginable pain and terror, which at times it does. This is visceral cinema at its finest.

Zama (2024)

The 18th century. Don Diego Zama has a predicament: he wants to leave the island he is stationed at to return to his family, but his responsibilities as the head magistrate – and his allegiance to the King (and Crown) of Spain – deny him such an easy exit. 

Initially slow in its pace, this Argentinian film turns into a Kafkaesque bureaucratical nightmare for our protagonist (played by Daniel Giménez Cacho) and draws you in with its excellent attention to detail of the period and its stellar cast. Stories and gossip about an infamous bandit pepper the plot amidst a variety of breath-taking vistas.

For those of you sick of traversing through the endless catalogue of sub-par movies with CGI or Unreal Engine-generated-locations, Zama is a passport to cinema paradise. It feels like a 1990s indie classic, something that I would have seen at the Cameo or Filmhouse in Edinburgh during what was (in my opinion) cinemas’ last great decade. 

One Second (2024)

Set during China’s cultural revolution, the protagonist staggers onto screen through the dusty sand dunes as a man on a mission: to see a reel of film that purportedly contains footage of his estranged daughter. 

What we have in this highly entertaining and whimsically funny film is a series of set pieces where our protagonist (played by Zhang Yi) finds himself caught up in a tragicomedy of trying to keep the film on schedule to be shown at the local cinema, despite his resolve to remain elusive and hidden because of his past. Ultimately it’s a game of cat VS mouse as a homeless orphan girl is determined to steal the film from him. 

Moments of poignancy and undertones of danger run throughout the plot which keep it aligned with a sense of realism. The only let down for me was that I felt the film could have ended five minutes earlier than it actually did  (perhaps test audiences didn’t favour what I thought was the original ending?). 

Despite this shortcoming I enjoyed it very much. I would class it as one of those lazy Sunday afternoon matinee-type movies to watch slumped on the sofa . And Mubi’s own take encapsulates it in a nutshell: it feels like an ode to Cinema Paradiso – it certainly is that!