How time flies, first month of the new year is nearly over. Don’t despair February is close and MUBI have a month that will have ‘anxiety’ as well as ‘Oscar Winners’.
Next month is bringing together a series of distinctive collections from around the world, eras, and styles, united by filmmakers who confront social realities. February will have Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective and Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties foreground acts of resistance and quiet tension within everyday life in Iran and Brazil. 4K restoration of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki celebrates a landmark of radical invention and youthful rebellion. RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys offers a devastating reckoning with historical trauma.
Heart Before Head: The Rom-com Variations reimagines love through melancholy, moral complexity, and formal play. Rounding out the programme, the “Big Five” Oscar® Winners collection and Andrea Arnold’s elemental Wuthering Heights affirm cinema’s enduring power to challenge convention, bear witness, and illuminate the forces that shape communities, memory, and desire.
CINEMA BY ANY MEANS: A JAFAR PANAHI RETROSPECTIVE
Following the UK theatrical release of Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident (2025), the Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective offers a vital overview of one of cinema’s most charged and defiant voices. Panahi observes everyday life in Iran while exposing the institutional oppression happening and acts of resistance against it. Blurring fiction and reality, his cinema turns ordinary gestures into political ones, finding humour, compassion, and resilience amid restriction. Whether attentive to children, women, or the marginalised, Panahi’s worldview is defined by humanity and an unyielding belief in the importance of bearing witness.
The White Balloon (Panahi, 1995) – 27th February
The Mirror (Panahi, 1997) – 27th February
The Circle (Panahi, 2000 – 27th February
Crimson Gold (Panahi, 2003) – 27th February
Offside (Panahi, 2006) – 27th February
Closed Curtain (Panahi & Partov, 2013) – 27th February
Taxi Tehran (Panahi, 2015) – 27th February
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: TROPICAL ANXIETIES
The Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties brings together a body of work that maps the quiet tensions and social fractures beneath everyday life in contemporary Brazil. From the intimate domestic space to the wilder wider political landscape, Filho reveals how communities are shaped, often through the small and unsettling details rather than overt drama.
From his early shorts to landmark features like Neighbouring Sounds (2012) and Bacurau (2019), the collection traces a filmmaker finely attuned to class, atmosphere, and place, where tropical warmth coexists with paranoia, violence, and resistance. The collection also arrives as anticipation builds for Filho’s latest, the Golden Globe-winning The Secret Agent (2025), reaffirming his status as one of cinema’s most incisive chroniclers of communities and what moves them.
Eletrodoméstica (Filho, 2005) – 20th February
Green Vinyl (Filho, 2005) – 20th February
Friday Night Saturday Morning (Filho, 2006) – 20th February
Cold Tropics (Filho, 2009) – 20th February
Neighbouring Sounds (Filho, 2012) – 20th February
Bacurau (Filho, 2019) – Now Streaming
Pictures of Ghosts (Filho, 2023) – 27th February
TOUKI BOUKI
Restored in vibrant 4K, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973) returns to cement itself as one of the most audacious debuts in world cinema. Drawing inspiration from the French New Wave while defiantly rejecting inherited ideas of African filmmaking, Mambéty forges a work of restless invention marked by visceral imagery, radical sound design, and a rebellious, youthful energy that reverberates in world cinema and pop culture to this day.
Set in 1970s Senegal, Touki Bouki follows young lovers Anta and Mory, disenchanted with life in Dakar and intoxicated by fantasies of escape to France. Their journey unfolds through a series of strange encounters and symbolic detours, drifting between realism and dream to transform the lovers-on-the-run narrative into something hypnotic and unforgettable.
Touki Bouki (Mambéty, 1973) – 1st February
NICKEL BOYS
RaMell Ross masterfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel into a formally rigorous reckoning with Nickel Boys (2025). Told through the experiences of boys confined to a brutal reform school, the film foregrounds memory, perception, and institutional violence in the Jim Crow South.
Widely acclaimed on the awards circuit, Nickel Boys extends Ross’s singular cinematic approach, combining political urgency with formal restraint. The result is a devastating, quietly radical work that confronts historical trauma with uncommon care.
Nickel Boys (Ross, 2024) – 27th February
HEART BEFORE HEAD: THE ROM-COM VARIATIONS
Softly reinventing what a romantic comedy can be, the Heart Before Head: The Rom-com Variations features several love stories that are as much shaped by their melancholy and moral conundrums. In Norman Jewison’s unapologetic Moonstruck (1987), romance arrives in a rush of operatic excess and emotional recklessness, whereas in Éric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale (1996), the tone shifts toward indecision, following a young casanova on a long summer vacation, stuck with the crushing dilemma of having multiple romantic possibilities. Meanwhile, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) asks if love can ever truly be erased, in a fractured love story that sees time looping in on itself in one man’s quest to circumvent heartbreak. Together these films suggest that love is rarely orderly, often irrational, and most alive when it refuses convention.
Charade (Donen, 1963) – 13th February
Moonstruck (Jewison, 1987) – 1st February
A Summer’s Tale (Rohmer, 1996) – 13th February
The Apartment (Wilder, 1960) – Now Streaming
The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) – Now Streaming
When Harry Met Sally… (Reiner, 1987) – Now Streaming
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004) – Now Streaming
Worst Person in the World (Trier, 2021) – Now Streaming
“BIG FIVE” OSCAR® WINNERS
Spanning more than five decades of cinema, the “Big Five” Oscar® Winners collection brings together the films that captured the Academy’s highest honours while also leaving a lasting cultural imprint. These are works that balance broad appeal with bold artistic vision, from the chilling psychology of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), to the dark but always hilarious snowbound fable of Joel Coen’s Fargo (1996), up to the razor-sharp social commentary of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), each film showcases storytelling that lingers long after the credits and narratives that continue to resonate across generations.
In the Heat of the Night (Jewison, 1967) – 15th February
The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991) – 15th February
Thelma & Louise (Scott, 1991) – 15th February
Fargo (Coen, 1996) – 15th February
Parasite (Bong, 2019) – 20th February
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Andrea Arnold’s primal Wuthering Heights (2011) strips Brontë’s novel to its raw, elemental core, letting the Yorkshire moors dominate as both setting and character. Heathcliff and Cathy’s passionate, often brutal love unfolds in mud, wind, and fog, their desires and conflicts rendered by earthly impulses. In doing so, Arnold emphasises the feral, physical intensity of Brontë’s romance over social convention and literary flourish.
Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011) – 13th February
MUBI UK & IRELAND FEBRUARY 2026
01/02/2026 | Magnificent Obsession | Douglas Sirk
01/02/2026 | Touki Bouki | Djibril Diop Mambéty
01/02/2026 | Moonstruck | Norman Jewison | Heart Before Head: The Rom-com Variations
03/02/2026 | What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? | Roberto Minervini
06/02/2026 | The General | Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman | Crash, Bang, Wallop: 130 Years of Buster Keaton
06/02/2026 | Sherlock Jr. | Buster Keaton | Crash, Bang, Wallop: 130 Years of Buster Keaton
06/02/2026 | Seven Chances | Buster Keaton | Crash, Bang, Wallop: 130 Years of Buster Keaton
06/02/2026 | Our Hospitality | Buster Keaton, John G. Blystone | Crash, Bang, Wallop: 130 Years of Buster Keaton
06/02/2026 | The Practice | Martín Rejtman
13/02/2026 | Charade | Stanley Donen | Heart Before Head: The Rom-com Variations
13/02/2026 | A Summer’s Tale | Éric Rohmer | Heart Before Head: The Rom-com Variations
13/02/2026 | Wuthering Heights | Andrea Arnold
13/02/2026 | Sentimental Value | Joachim Trier | MUBI Releases | review
15/02/2026 | Fargo | Joel Coen | “Big Five” Oscar® Winners
15/02/2026 | The Silence of The Lambs | Jonathan Demme | “Big Five” Oscar® Winners
15/02/2026 | In The Heat of The Night | Norman Jewison | “Big Five” Oscar® Winners
20/02/2026 | Neighbouring Sounds | Kleber Mendonça Filho | Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties
20/02/2026 | Mekong Hotel | Apichatpong Weerasethakul
20/02/2026 | Green Vinyl | Kleber Mendonça Filho | Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties
20/02/2026 | Cold Tropics | Kleber Mendonça Filho | Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties
20/02/2026 | Eletrodoméstica | Kleber Mendonça Filho | Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties
20/02/2026 | Parasite | Bong Joon Ho | “Big Five” Oscar® Winners | review
20/02/2026 | Friday Night Saturday Morning | Kleber Mendonça Filho | Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties
20/02/2026 | Being John Smith | John Smith | Brief Encounters
27/02/2026 | The Circle | Jafar Panahi | Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective
27/02/2026 | Offside | Jafar Panahi | Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective
27/02/2026 | Crimson Gold | Jafar Panahi | Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective
27/02/2026 | The Mirror | Jafar Panahi | Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective
27/02/2026 | White Balloon | Jafar Panahi | First Films First
27/02/2026 | Closed Curtain | Jafar Panahi | Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective
27/02/2026 | Altman | Ron Mann
27/02/2026 | Taxi Tehran | Jafar Panahi | Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective
27/02/2026 | Pictures of Ghosts | Kleber Mendonça Filho | Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties
27/02/2026 | Nickel Boys | RaMell Ross
Related
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
