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Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. The retrospective The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk is showing February 12 - June 18, 2017 in the United States and in many other countries around the world.As the reverberation of horses fervently neighing and clomping their hooves begins to permeate the opening credit soundtrack of The Beast, one may recall the similarly orchestrated donkey brays that introduce Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966). Or, given its title, and the very basic concept of a young woman becoming enamored with an savage creature, one may be tempted to compare this 1975 feature to the many variations of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s classic fairy tale, La belle et la bête. One would be more than a little confounded, however, by making either inadequate association. If Walerian Borowczyk’s semi-porn-semi-art-semi-monster movie bears any resemblance to another film or story, it would be...

Only a small handful of films are produced in Costa Rica every year, and even fewer (if any) are afforded any sort of international distribution. But, however unfortunate that may be, the fluorescent purgatory of Jurgen Ureña’s “Abrázame Como Antes” is made all the more striking by virtue of its uncertain commercial future — Ureña’s second feature is a beautiful micro-portrait of a world that tourists and foreigners may never see, and the movie’s power is only compounded by the unavoidable fact that most tourists and foreigners will never see it.

Borrowing its name from a line in Jeane Manson’s 1979 pop hit “Avant de Nous Dire Adieu,” “Abrázame Como Antes” tells a story that’s canopied beneath the muted evening hum of streetlights and distant cars. The film’s title translates to “Hold Me Like Before,” and every frame of this tender still life buzzes with the...