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Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves is screening exclusively on Mubi in many countries.Fallen Leaves.There’s a moment early in Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film, Fallen Leaves (2023), that will surely tug at the heartstrings of shy lovers everywhere. A man, Holappa (played by Jussi Vatanen), and a woman, Ansa (Alma Pöysti), sit across from each other in a bar. Between them, his friend tries vainly to flirt with hers, getting nowhere, but Holappa and Ansa themselves do not speak, and instead merely stare meekly into their drinks, the gap of a few meters opening up like a yawning chasm. Then, for just a moment, Holappa looks up from his beer and their eyes meet. And as they do, the first cascading piano chords of Franz Schubert’s “Serenade” are heard and a besuited man takes the karaoke stage to start singing: “Softly my songs plead / through the night for...

Aki Kaurismäki. Photo courtesy of Janus Films.Watching an Aki Kaurismäki film can feel like dropping in on a world just out of step with our own. All the elements are there—the streets, the buildings, the people (and their docile dogs). But something is always off. A man’s desk is taken away while he’s still sitting at it to indicate he’s been laid off. A woman asks a pharmacist what rat poison does. “It kills,” the pharmacist says blankly. It’s as if the Finnish filmmaker is recreating a version of planet Earth with all the nuance removed. These highly orchestrated facsimiles should feel foreign, but their simplicity and dry humor instead allows for a familiarity to sink in. His universe is in fact far more relatable—and far more human—than meets the eye. Although he’s gained a reputation as a comically cynical auteur,...

By Michael Atkinson

When we first met Aki Kaurismäki, in 1989 when "Ariel" had its run as probably the first Finnish film to play theatrically in America since Jörn Donner's "Portraits of Women" (1970), we more or less fell in love. Lost in the hollow skull of the Reagan-Bush '80s, suffering the ascension of Spielberg and Ivan Reitman and Shane Black, wondering what remote atoll international art cinema had escaped to, and more or less completely ignorant of Finnish life, we had every reason to embrace this last of the red hot deadpan existentialists, whose films somehow altered the cellular structure of working class depression and turned it into cool comedy. His distinctively bittersweet dyspepsia established Kaurismäki, in a thick run of films that included "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" (1989), "The Match Factory Girl" (1990) and "La Vie de Bohème" (1992), as a new arthouse brand name, a kind of vodka-weary Bresson-meets-Tati.

Kaurismäki...