MUBI Podcast

In 2019, Brazil's Kleber Mendonça Filho won the Jury Prize at Cannes with his co-directed movie BACURAU.  This year he returned to the fest to premiere a documentary about movies.  Or more specifically, about the places we watch them. In the second installment of our mini-season of conversations taped on location at Cannes '23, Filho tells host Rico Gagliano about PICTURES OF GHOSTS.  It...

To kick off our mini-season of conversations taped on location at the 2023 Cannes film festival, host Rico Gagliano meets up with legendary director Wim Wenders ( Buena Vista Social Club ; Paris, Texas ). The subject of their conversation: Wenders' new 3D documentary Anselm , which plunges the audience into the work of German fine artist Anselm Kiefer.  Wenders explains why he loves making ar...

We wrap up our season on great needle drops with an interview mixtape. Host Rico Gagliano talks to three legendary music supervisors about their iconic pairings of music and image...a bunch of which likely provided the soundtrack to some part of your life. Featuring Randall Poster (KIDS, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, SUMMER OF SOUL), Margaret Yen (JUNO), and the late John Hughes's go-to music guy...

In his gritty ’55 flick BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, director Richard Brooks introduced a wide audience to Sidney Poitier, the harsh world of inner-city schools...and a genre of music called "rock ‘n’ roll." Host Rico Gagliano tells the story of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock"—cinema's first rock needle drop—with the help of music detective and author Jim Dawson, film writ...

Shot on a shoestring in six wild weeks, CHUNGKING EXPRESS is the movie that put legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai on the international map—along with his star, pop diva Faye Wong...and her Cantonese cover of The Cranberries's hit "Dreams." Host Rico Gagliano learns how the song, the director, and the singer all came together to capture Hong Kong at a moment of anxiety and h...

In his Oscar-nominated CLOSE, filmmaker Lukas Dhont uses the sparest dialogue, the gentlest music, and the most pastoral of images...to tell a shattering story about the brutal ways society turns boys into men. We're taking a mid-season break from our series on movie music to bring you this candid interview with Dhont—in which he tells host Rico Gagliano how he writes like a dancer, why this...

In 1972, director Perry Henzell set a gritty crime thriller in Jamaica's exploding, politically charged music scene, and came up with THE HARDER THEY COME—the cult-movie spark  that started reggae music's slow burn around the world. Host Rico Gagliano tells the story of a film and a soundtrack that inspired rebels and rockers from the Clash to Willie Nelson. Guests include Henzell's...

In 2001, writer/director Richard Kelly's genre-busting rookie feature DONNIE DARKO crashed and burned at the box office. But it almost immediately rose from the ashes to become one of the first cult hits of the 21st century...and it took the music of '80s band Tears for Fears along for the ride. Host Rico Gagliano tells this twisty tale with the help of Kelly, star Jena Malone (THE HUNGE...

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY pushed movies light years into the future. It pioneered the use of special effects, makeup, sound design…and needle drops. For the season debut of our audio documentary series, host Rico Gagliano tells the story of the now-legendary classical tracks Kubrick dropped into his space movie—something the director did against the advice of jus...

The multiple-Oscar-nominated psychodrama TÁR is the story of a compulsive, privileged leader who abuses her power. In this special episode of the MUBI Podcast, writer/director Todd Field tells host Rico Gagliano why he set that story in a concert hall instead of the halls of politics. Also up for discussion: Cate Blanchett’s small miracles, why Field prefers marathons to sprints, and his mentor St...

Charlotte Wells's wildly acclaimed feature-length debut AFTERSUN follows a father and daughter on a vacation where much is implied but little is said...unless you listen close to the soundtrack. In this special bonus episode, Wells tells host Rico Gagliano about the '80s and '90s-era needle drops that pepper the film, from Bran Van 3000 to the accidental discovery of a Queen track t...

In 1972, a lush pop ballad called "The Mist" swirled out of radios all over South Korea. Fifty years later, master auteur Park Chan-wook has taken it as the main inspiration for his celebrated new thriller-romance DECISION TO LEAVE. In this special episode of the award-winning MUBI Podcast, Park tells host Rico Gagliano about the song's influence on the film, unveils the musical ins...

"Only in Theaters" concludes with the cautionary tale of the Majestic. Africa's island region of Zanzibar used to be movie crazy — but today just one cinema remains: The Majestic, a 1950s-era building with roots that go back even further. Host Rico Gagliano speaks to folks around the world about the wild glory days of Zanzibar's cinema culture, why it's now on the brink of...

This week, we have a special bonus episode courtesy of our Latin American podcast MUBI Podcast: Encuentros . To celebrate the exclusive release of MEMORIA on MUBI in many countries, we're excited to share this discussion between Tilda Swinton and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Swinton and Weerasethakul reunited in Colombia for MEMORIA's release and talked about the importance of understandin...

For the first half-century of cinema, most movies were made and printed on nitrate film. Problem: it easily decomposes, it's easily combustible, and once it's on fire, you can't put it out.  Only a few theaters on Earth can safely screen nitrate prints...and only one has an annual festival dedicated to the format: The George Eastman Museum's Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New Yor...

In the grey Thatcher-era England of the '80s, a romantically dilapidated London movie palace called The Scala beckoned to England's subcultures — and influenced filmmakers from Christopher Nolan to Steve McQueen. Host Rico Gagliano learns the wild, seedy, and ultimately poignant history of what John Waters called, "A country club for lunatics." Special guests include directors...

Hal Ashby's HAROLD AND MAUDE debuted to generally poor reviews, and worse box office.  But in suburban Minneapolis, a humble second-run neighborhood theater called The Westgate found the film an audience...and helped turn it into one of the biggest cult hits of all time. Host Rico Gagliano gets the story from HAROLD AND MAUDE producer Charles Mulvehill — one of the few living members of the f...

In 1970, a scruffy repertory theater — led by the visionary Ben Barenholtz — quietly placed a print ad in the Village Voice, advertising midnight screenings of a Spanish-language western they claimed was "too heavy to be shown any other way."  The movie was Alejandro Jodorowsky's EL TOPO, and it'd kick off the "Midnite Movie" craze that changed moviegoing. Hear the hi...

In 1940s France, a little 50-seat cinema opened that would launch one revolution on international movie screens...and arguably a second one in the streets of Paris. Host Rico Gagliano delves into the wild history of the Cinémathèque Française and its legendary founder, Henri Langlois. Featuring interviews with directors Barbet Schroeder (BARFLY, REVERSAL OF FORTUNE) and Luc Moullet (BRIGITTE ET BR...

On this special episode, host Rico Gagliano talks to Cannes-winning filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun about his latest film LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS — the story of a mother trying to secure an abortion for her daughter...in Chad, a country where abortion is illegal. Haroun opens up about the movie's real-life inspirations, the collective power of women, and about his homeland's last remaini...

In this special episode, acclaimed filmmaker Joachim Trier tells host Rico Gagliano about how and why he made his tender look at messy modern romance, THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD—from constructing its Oscar-nominated screenplay to casting his star Renate Reinsve (who went on to win Best Actress at Cannes for the role). He also reflects on the dangers of nostalgia and then indulges in some of his...

The MUBI Podcast returns this week with a special episode. Host Rico Gagliano speaks with Oscar-winning filmmaker Andrea Arnold (AMERICAN HONEY, FISH TANK) about COW — her gripping debut documentary chronicling the life of a single dairy cow. In the interview, Arnold opens up about the deeply personal interpretations audiences have brought to the nearly dialogue-free film, and how making it has af...

China’s Lunar New Year movie season is like America’s summer blockbuster season… on steroids.  And it got that way thanks to THE DREAM FACTORY — a wry 1997 comedy directed by Feng Xiaogang, who’d come to be known as “the Chinese Spielberg.”  Host Rico Gagliano gets a crash course on the movie from experts on Chinese cinema, including City University of New York’s Ying Zhu and UCLA’s Michael Berry....

The biggest box office hit in the history of the Soviet Union was an early 1970s Mexican romance so obscure in its home country that even many experts on the era haven’t heard of it.  Host Rico Gagliano talks with several who have, including esteemed cinema historian Ian Christie, Concordia University’s Masha Salazkina, and actress Emoé de la Parra, the daughter of the hugely successful author Yol...

One of the world’s most prolific film industries was founded on the success of a direct-to-video film distributed on VHS cassettes.  Host Rico Gagliano learns the history of LIVING IN BONDAGE — the indie project that launched Nigeria’s “Nollywood.”  Featuring interviews with the movie’s writer/producer Okey Ogunjiofor and director Chris Obi-Rapu. Our first season, titled “Lost in Translation,” spo...