February At MUBI Will Have Anxiety And Oscar Winners

With February just around the corner, MUBI have revealed it will be a month of ‘anxiety’ as well as ‘Oscar winners’.

Next month brings together a series of distinctive collections from eras, styles and around the world, all from filmmakers who confront social realities. February will have Cinema By Any Means: A Jafar Panahi Retrospective and Kleber Mendonça Filho: Tropical Anxieties which put acts of resistance and quiet tension within everyday life in Iran and Brazil in the foreground. A 4K restoration of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki celebrates a landmark of radical invention and youthful rebellion. And RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys offers a devastating reckoning with historical trauma.

Heart Before Head: The Rom-com Variations re-imagines love through melancholy, moral complexity, and sheer recklessness. Rounding out the programme is the “Big Five” Oscar® Winners collection, with Andrea Arnold’s elemental Wuthering Heights affirming cinema’s enduring power to challenge convention, bear witness, and illuminate the forces that shape communities, memory, and desire.

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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 institutional oppression 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 focusing on 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 bigger political landscape, Filho reveals how communities are shaped, often through 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 co-exists 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 reality and fantasy 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 in 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 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 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 refutes 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 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) and then to the razor-sharp social commentary of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), each film showcases storytelling that lingers long after the credits have rolled 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.