MUBI Blog

37°2 LE MATIN

With an original title like that, is there another film that screams out “summertime viewing” any louder than Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1986 cult favorite Betty Blue? Watch it now for free (one week only!) and keep an eye out for more free Beineix. More news from MUBI and The Auteurs…

FILM HISTORY COMES ALIVE IN FLICKER ALLEY

Last year, the National Society of Film Critics presented its Film Heritage Award to Flicker Alley for publishing “rare early US and foreign silent film.” Barely eight years old now, Flicker Alley has won the respect and deeply felt appreciation of cinephiles for its high-quality digital editions of previously neglected major landmarks of film history. Now viewers in the US and Canada can watch a selection of works by the likes of the Lumière Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Georges Méliès and the Fleischers online — many of them for free.

YOU DIDN’T MISS THIS, DID YOU?

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky wishes Abel Ferrara a happy 59th; Daniel Kasman’s ode to Joan Bennett; Glenn Kenny on what’s happened to Wim Wenders; R. Emmet Sweeney on the incomparable Robert Flaherty Seminar; Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Agnès Varda; the trailer for David Fincher’s The Social Network; all things Inception.

IF YOU ONLY SEE ONE MOVIE THIS WEEK

No one’s lukewarm on Todd Solondz. If you find him to be a daring, vital and unique voice in American independent cinema, you won’t want to miss Life During Wartime, the not-quite-a-sequel to Happiness. If you find him shooting for a unique and daring vitality and missing by a severely wide margin, how about Emir Kusturica as a renegade KGB officer in Christian Carion’s Cold War thriller Farewell?

MORE ESSENTIAL SUMMER READING

With more than 60 essays packed between its virtual covers, the Summer 2010 issue of Jump Cut arrives online with a thump and all the heaviosity of a damn book, with special sections on experimental documentary, corporate Hollywood today, torture and horror, a roundtable on Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, experimental and artworlds, sex and its anxieties and US and international film and television.

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