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Movies Watched, August 2016

Whenever I’m about to do a bunch of travel, as was the case last month, I re-up my subscription to Mubi, a “hand picked” streaming video service that specializes in independent fare, movie classics and international cinema. Most people assume Mubi is analogous to Netflix except for film snobs, but that’s not quite right. There are only thirty films available on Mubi at any one time; each day a new one is published by the service’s curators and an old one expires—disappears, gone, forever, more or less.

Like Netflix you can stream Mubi’s films at any time, and like Amazon Prime you can download them to your device for offline viewing, but this you-get-it-for-just-a-month model is a wonderful way to draw users’ attentions to films they might otherwise overlook. I’ve watched lots of really fascinating, powerful stuff on Mubi that I almost surely would never have seen otherwise. I’ve also watched some less than stellar oddball flicks, but I’ve never watched a Mubi selection that hasn’t been illuminating and rewarding in some unique way.

Here are all nineteen of the films I watched in August:

If you’re interested, here’s my list from July, June, May, April, March and my list for January and February. And you can follow along with my film diary on Letterboxd, too.

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