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Mingling retrospectives, themed series, and a handful of new films’ streaming premieres, Mubi’s August 2024 lineup is unveiled. At the top comes “American Outsider: The Films of Kelly Reichardt,” which joins Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff with the already-playing Certain Women and River of Grass.

Streaming premieres are being given to four new films we admired: Ernst De Geer’s The Hypnosis, Mikhaël Hers’ The Passengers of the Night, Baloji’s Omen, and Levan Akin’s Crossing, a Mubi release. Meanwhile, Sean Durkin’s The Nest joins “The Art of Deception: Swindlers, Scoundrels and Sharks,” a series including Alain Resnais’ little-seen Stavisky, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, and Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave.

Check out the lineup below, and get 30 days free here.

August 1st

Wendy & Lucy, directed by Kelly Reichardt | American Outsider: The Films of Kelly Reichardt

Meek’s Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt | American Outsider: The Films of Kelly Reichardt

Omen,...

After unveiling the discs that will be arriving in April, including Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder, Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep, and more, Criterion has now announced what will be coming to their streaming channel next month.

Highlights include retrospectives dedicated to Guy Maddin, Ruby Dee, Lana Turner, and Gordon Parks, plus selections from Marlene Dietrich & Josef von Sternberg’s stellar box set. They will also present the exclusive streaming premieres of Bill Duke’s The Killing Floor, William Greaves’s Nationtime, Kevin Jerome Everson’s Park Lanes, and more.

Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which recently arrived on the collection, will be landing on the channel as well, along with a special “Lovers on the Run” series including film noir (They Live by Night) to New Hollywood (Badlands) to the French New Wave (Pierrot le fou) to Blaxploitation (Thomasine & Bushrod) and beyond. Also...

Olivier Meyrou with Anne-Katrin Titze on Saint Laurent director Bertrand Bonello and screenwriter Thomas Bidegain: "He wanted to see Celebration for the last part of the movie." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The morning before going to the new Pace Gallery in Chelsea for David Hockney’s La Grande Cour, Normandy exhibition and meeting with Bacurau directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles and with Sônia Braga at Cinetic Media, Olivier Merou, the director of Celebration joined me for a conversation at Film Forum on his long-awaited Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé documentary.

It's shot by Jean-Marc Bouzou and Florian Bouchet over three years starting in 1998 with a terrific score by François-Eudes Chanfrault (Clément Cogitore’s Neither Heaven Nor Earth) and sound production by Yolande Decarsin and Ludovic Escallier, and we see Catherine Deneuve, Loulou De La Falaise, Katoucha Niane, and Laetitia Casta, among others, interact with the master. With style and flair,...

This amazingly candid documentary reveals the designer in a terrible decline as he rules his studio like a latter-day Sun King

Most fashion documentaries are pretty sycophantic. Not this one. The long-delayed release of Olivier Meyrou’s Yves Saint Laurent: The Last Collections – alternatively (and ironically) titled Celebration – gives us an amazingly candid and rather shocking study of the legendary fashion designer, and his apparent physical and mental deterioration at the age of 60, as he was preparing his final show in 1999 as an independent designer in the old style, before selling the Ysl brand to Gucci.

The film was originally shown in 2007, but then withdrawn under legal pressure from Saint Laurent’s business and personal partner Pierre Bergé, who emerges from the film as callous, cynical, manipulative and cruel, calling Saint Laurent a “sleepwalker” who depends on his “anxieties”. Bergé is shown all but mocking what appears to be Saint...

The designer and his partner Pierre Bergé are seen at the height of their success, but permission to screen it was refused

In 1998 a young filmmaker called Olivier Meyrou was invited by Pierre Bergé, the long-term partner of Yves Saint-Laurent, to film the pair at the height of their success. He spent three years capturing the most intimate moments of their everyday lives, forming a close circle of trust. But when the film found a distributor Bergé insisted the footage never be seen, despite not having seen any of it himself.

In 2015, two years before his death, Bergé finally gave permission for it to be shown and now, nearly two decades after filming was wrapped up, 11 years after Saint-Laurent died, Yves Saint-Laurent: The Last Collections will be released in cinemas this week. Despite what he calls an “ugly fight”, Meyrou insists there is no bad blood.

Zombi Child director Bertrand Bonello on Olivier Meyrou's Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé documentary Celebration: "It's beautiful. A beautiful film." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The last time I spoke with Bertrand Bonello, it was on Nocturama at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema luncheon in 2017, hosted by uniFrance at Robert De Niro's Locanda Verde in Tribeca. The event was also attended by Django director Étienne Comar and Reda Kateb (who portrays Django Reinhardt), Film at Lincoln Center's Director of Programming Dennis Lim, along with numerous members of the French film delegation.

This time around, Bertrand and I met at the Hudson Hotel the morning before the New York Film Festival Us Premiere at Alice Tully Hall of his latest film, Zombi Child, with Mackenson Bijou, Louise Labèque, Wislanda Louimat, Katiana Wilfort, Adelé David, Ninon François, Mathilde Riu, and Patrick Boucheron. This is not Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die.

“I was 32, Yves was 26. Everything seemed wonderful. Later, you’re less easily satisfied. At first, you create art from nothing. Then, little by little, things start getting complicated,” says Pierre Bergé, the business partner, former lover, and longtime companion of French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. His words play over a scene in Olivier Meyrou’s Celebration, where Bergé stands against a large, decadent window while the blinds get lifted. His right profile gets clearer and clearer as more and more light fill up the screen. From 1998 to 2001, Bergé had given Meyrou unlimited access to film Ysl’s final couture collection before the fashion house of Yves Saint Laurent got taken over by Gucci. As the takeover drew closer, Bergé executed some grand swan songs for the fashion house, of which the Yves Saint Laurent parade at the Stade de France before the end of the 1998 France-Brazil Football World Cup was the grandest.

Director Olivier Meyrou spent nearly three years embedded in the world of fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent as he was preparing what would be his final show. The resulting documentary premiered at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival, but was then suppressed after its only public screening, blocked by Pierre Bergé, business partner and occasional romantic partner to the legendary designer. Now, a decade after Laurent’s death and a few years after Bergé has passed away, the film–titled Celebration–has been reworked and will finally get a release.

With the relationship at the center between Yves Saint Laurent and Bergé said to have been an inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread–specifically Daniel Day-Lewis and Lesley Manville’s characters–the film provides a fascinating real-life peek into this high fashion world and the dynamics within it. Set to open at Film Forum on October 2 and expand in the...

Exclusive: Streaming service and theatrical distributor Mubi has picked up world rights to Luca Guadagnino’s short drama The Staggering Girl, marking the company’s first global deal for a new film.

Directed by Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name), the 35-minute piece stars Julianne Moore, Mia Goth, KiKi Layne, Kyle MacLachlan, Marthe Keller, and Alba Rohrwacher. It debuted at Cannes.

Mubi has acquired world rights excluding Italy, China, Japan, Russia, and theatrical rights in Turkey. The deal was negotiated between Kevin Chan for Mubi, Endeavor Content and Rai.

The Italy and New York-set film tells the story of Francesca (Moore), an Italian-American writer who lives in New York and must return to Rome to retrieve her ageing mother. Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto provides the music for the film, which was lit by Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria DoP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.

The visually striking short is produced in...

Streaming service also takes Yves Saint Laurent documentary Celebration.

London-based streaming service and theatrical distributor Mubi has added four titles to its UK release slate, including three films from this year’s Cannes.

They include Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau, which premiered in Cannes Competition this year. The film, described as a “mix of socio-political commentary with genre influences” in Screen’s review, tied for the festival’s jury prize with Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables. International sales are handled by Sbs International.

Mubi has also taken UK rights to Diao Yinan’s Chinese-language noir gangland thriller The Wild Goose Lake,...

The organizers of the True/False Film Fest, taking place in Columbia, Missouri, on February 28 to March 3, are announcing their lineup exclusively to IndieWire. The 36 feature films and 18 short films (full list below) were culled from “roughly” 1,100 submissions.

Among the 36 new features, four of the films announced are world premieres. “The Hottest August,” is from director Brett Story and explores the anxieties of a “sweltering” New York City. “Midnight in Paris,” the directorial feature debut from Roni Moore and James Blagden, follows the Flint Northern High School’s senior class of 2012 as the Michigan students prepare for prom. Brazil-based filmmaker Maíra Bühler will screen “Let it Burn,” described as a tender portrait of addicts housed in a converted hotel in São Paulo’s notorious Cracolândia neighborhood. And the fourth T/F world premiere is director Jeffrey Peixoto’s exploration into what attracts members to the Church of Scientology in “Over the Rainbow.

In 1998, French filmmaker Olivier Meyrou filmed Yves Saint Laurent as he prepared what would be his final collection before the top-tier fashion brand sold to Gucci the following year. It was the end of an era, as Saint Laurent was already the last of the great French designers to operate his own house, and this would be his “Celebration” — although the man Meyrou observed was far different from what his legend suggested: reclusive, irritable, virtually silent, and, perhaps most shockingly, quite inelegant.

Ironic title notwithstanding, “Celebration” feels less like hollow adulation than some kind of macabre autopsy conducted on a still-living specimen. Saint Laurent died a full decade later, but seems barely there in this often contradictory portrait, which is simultaneously respectful of his genius and perturbed by the twitching, tragic creature Saint Laurent has become. Still, what kind of monster is cooed over by supermodels and treated like royalty by his staff?...

Barbarian Invasion: Arcady Hits the Headlines for Procedural

Recounting a bizarre kidnapping case from 2006 that reflects the continuing cultural mutation of anti-Semitism and the modernized hate crime, Alexandre Arcady’s 24 Days reenacts a cruel and digesting instance eventually projected by the media, where it was titled The Affair of the Gang of Barbarians, as a national outcry to end hate crimes. With authorities initially reluctant to admit the underlying bigotry that spurred the kidnapping, torture, and eventual murder of Ilan Halimi that took place over nearly a month, it appears increasing political pressures only served to limit necessary discussions pertaining to the abductor’s motivations for kidnapping Halimi, namely his Jewishness.

On January 31, 2006, Ilan Halimi (Syrus Shahidi), a cell phone vendor in a Parisian suburb, has a secret rendezvous with a beautiful young woman he’s made a date with. The date is secret because Ilan already has a girlfriend,...