mubi.com

Seven little letters, but they’ve changed my life. It’s not hard to see the logic. We can’t go out to shops - so they do home delivery. We can’t go out to cinemas, so streaming companies offer goodies - in this case a free sample period of three months. Compared with Netflix, mubi is tiny - but that’s part of the attraction. There’s a short, clear list of films, a lot of world cinema, some classics and some hidden gems. They stay on for a month, and each day new ones come on at the top of the list, and ones that have been there a month drop off. You can find your way around, and you know understand the terms of the deal. Better than that, there’s a clear intelligence and enthusiasm guiding the selections. They not only want you to watch, they want you to understand and explore. So there are strands and themes, connections you can make. Jean-Pierre Melville, anyone? If you’d asked me a month ago, I couldn’t have named one of his films. Now I’ve watched three of them, and loved them all. Plus, there was the Korean Vengeance trilogy, with Joseph Losey coming up this month. I’m sorry that this will sound like a commercial, and I am not being paid for writing this, but it’s too good to keep to myself.