5 Best Movies to Watch on Mubi Right Now
This year’s Oscar winner owes its immense success to the streamer with several hidden gems.
Unlike Netflix or Prime Video, Mubi might not be a popular choice when it comes to getting a streaming subscription, yet it can still offer its viewers plenty of compelling movies, some of which are recent award-winning masterpieces.
The company received a much wider recognition when it picked up Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar-winning body horror The Substance, taking the control over the film when it was abandoned by Universal.
Since then, Mubi has been rising to stardom as a new and quite promising platform which, even with a collection of movies and shows it currently has, might soon become as big as the most popular streamers out there.
Bird (2024)
Andrea Arnold’s gripping coming-of-age drama everyone should definitely talk more about, Bird came as an acting debut for Nykiya Adams who stars as Bailey, a 12-year-old living in north Kent with her devoted yet still dissipated father Bug and brother Hunter.
As puberty starts hitting, Bailey doesn’t really have anyone to turn to when the company is most needed, and that’s when she meets Bird, a mysterious young man making a journey out of the most important mission of his life.
Initially repelled by the stranger, Bailey soon finds out that he’s the one who can help her go through the most turbulent times she’s ever had.
Boyhood (2014)
A pure and most sincere homage to childhood and adolescence, Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age drama took more than 10 years to be finished, depicting the life of Mason Evans Jr. from when he was six years old right until eighteen.
Starring Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as Mason’s divorced parents, Boyhood is still regarded as one of the best movies of recent years and a deserving awards season frontrunner that took home six Academy Awards, including one for Best Supporting Actress for Arquette.
Dahomey (2024)
One of the most acclaimed documentary features in the last couple of years, the recent work of Mati Diop, a French director of Senegalese origin, explores the painful theme of national heritage taken far away from home by colonisers.
Dahomey follows through the process of the return of artifacts to the Kingdom of Dahomey (nowadays Benin) after they spent several decades in museums in Paris; the movie’s most compelling and sometimes even frightening twist is the presence of an ancient Dahomey statue who Diop gives its own POV from the inside of the box it’s being transported in.
Dahomey received universal praise and eventually won several major awards, including the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival back in 2024.
Passages (2023)
A romantic drama with a pretty unexpected twist to say the least, Passages stars Bird’s actor Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw as Tomas and Martin, a gay couple whose relationship starts falling apart once Tomas begins a passionate affair with Agathe, a younger school teacher he meets after completing his work on a movie as a director.
The movie remains a massive hit among both critics and viewers, holding scores of 95% and 70% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Substance (2024)
This year’s Oscar winner for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Coralie Fargeat’s body horror stars Best Actress nominee Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley as two versions of the same person competing with each other over their right to live their life to the fullest.
So far the biggest hit Mubi has ever acquired the rights for, The Substance follows Moore’s actress Elizabeth Sparkle who is pushed out of the entertainment industry once everyone decides that she needs to be replaced by some fresh blood.
Things get messier when Elizabeth, determined to not let her fading career go, signs up for The Substance, welcoming into the world a new version of herself; the latter, however, will bring along much more trouble rather than solutions.
