MUBI in December Will Be A ‘Mastermind’
Tomorrow is a new day. Tomorrow is also a new month. Over at MUBI they will have a new selection films and shows that will be a ‘Mastermind’!
December will see Kelly Reichardt offer a fresh unraveling of the heist genre with The Mastermind led by a magnetic Josh O’Connor. Emma Seligman reshapes the high-school comedy with Bottoms, and Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s miniseries The New Years (2024) arrives on the platform. With 2026 so close, the series anchors MUBI’s Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?: New Year’s on Film Collection. The collection also features four films capturing the highs and lows of the year’s final night. The new Truly Madly Deeply Collection gathers four tales of all-consuming love inspired by Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love.
MUBI RELEASES: THE MASTERMIND
Kelly Reichardt turns the heist thriller into a wry study of a man adrift in the Palme d’Or nominated The Mastermind (2025). Josh O’Connor plays J.B. Mooney, an ex art student turned suburban layabout, who treats fatherhood, work, and crime all with the same shrugging reluctance. His half-baked plan to steal several Arthur Dove paintings reveals less a criminal mastermind, but instead a man desperate to escape his vacuum of responsibility.
Set against a backdrop of ‘70s Vietnam-era disillusionment, and more a portrait of inertia than a crime caper, Reichardt’s tender look at a man coasting through a world that demands more than he’s willing to give is both a funny and bitterly pointed satire of American individualism and the fantasies it enables.
The Mastermind (Reichardt, 2025) – 12th December
BOTTOMS
Emma Seligman rewires the high-school comedy into something stranger, hornier, and far more anarchic than usual with Bottoms (2023). Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri anchor the chaos with impeccable chemistry as two queer best friends who start a fight club to impress beautiful cheerleaders, until their misguided bravado spirals them into increasingly absurd scenarios.
A comic fever dream that delights in its own inspired stupidity, underneath its raucous exterior, Bottoms often finds flashes of real warmth as a great tribute to queer friendships and female empowerment.
Bottoms (Seligman, 2023) – 1st December
THE NEW YEARS
César-winning filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen masterfully delivers his 10-part miniseries The New Years (2024), a quietly romantic portrait of two lives unfolding in parallel against the backdrop of ten New Year’s Eves. What starts as a passing connection on their 30th birthdays becomes a ritual for Ana and Óscar, as the pair reunite every New Year’s Eve over the next decade – offering a glimpse of their relationship only in annual fragments as it is shaped by attraction, hesitation, and everything left unspoken.
Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, the miniseries pairs Sorogoyen’s naturalism with bold formal direction, culminating in a 40-minute single take for its final chapter. Featuring spellbinding performances from Iria del Río and Francesco Carril, The New Years gradually evolves into a study of connection shaped by the shifting contours of time.
The New Years (Sorogoyen, 2024) – 2-episode launch then weekly episodes from 3rd December.
SHOULD OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE FOR FORGOT?: NEW YEAR’S ON FILM
A sweep of New Year’s Eve classics – from romantic confessions to familial upheavals – our Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?: New Year’s on Film Collection gathers five films that capture those charged hours between one year and the next and the importance we place upon them. Each unfolding in that suspended time of the year when celebration mingles with doubt, when we promise ourselves small reinventions and hope to follow them with conviction… Whether marked by tenderness, chaos, or catharsis, these films remind us that New Year’s Eve isn’t just a party, it’s an annual ritual of possibility, inviting us to imagine who we might become as the clock resets.
The Apartment (Wilder, 1960) – 1st December
Phantom Thread (Anderson, 2017) – 1st December
The New Years (Sorogoyen, 2024) – 2-episode launch then weekly episodes from 3rd December
When Harry Met Sally… (Reiner, 1989) – 15th December
TRULY MADLY DEEPLY
To coincide with the release of Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (2025), our new collection Truly, Madly, Deeply gathers films in which love becomes volatile, overwhelming, and difficult to contain.
Bringing together new gems, classic Hollywood melodramas, and landmark arthouse titles, the collection explores relationships pushed past comfort — where restless longing and dangerous obsession blur into one, and connections grow so consuming they threaten to unmake their protagonists.
Written on the Wind (Sirk, 2024) – 1st December
Phantom Thread (Anderson, 2017) – 1st December
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004) – 15th December
45 Years (Haigh, 2015) – 15th December
And more now streaming!
HUNGRY FOR LOVE: TWO BY PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
Paul Thomas Anderson’s takes a tender peek into the curious lives of a loved-up folie à deux in Phantom Thread (2017). Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps) reshape the world they live in through unorthodox rituals and games, revealing how two people in love can arrive at their own peculiar equilibrium, even when their behaviour sits in quiet defiance of the world around them. Meanwhile, in Licorice Pizza (2021), Anderson explores a different side of the romantic spectrum, shifting to the giddy chaos of young love and capturing the exhilaration, mischief, and unpredictable energy of adolescence.
Phantom Thread (Anderson, 2017) – 1st December
Licorice Pizza (Anderson, 2021) – Now Streaming
WOMEN TALKING
Sarah Polley’s critically-acclaimed Women Talking (2022) centers on eight Mennonite women wrestling with a shocking truth: the men in their community have been abusing them for years. As they debate whether to forgive, flee, or fight back, their heated discussions reveal courage, solidarity, and moral complexity, with each woman voicing a distinct perspective in this urgent, character-driven moral reckoning.
Women Talking (Polley, 2022) – 1st December
GET OUT
An instant classic from the get-go, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) as he travels with his white girlfriend to meet her family, only to slowly discover that a horrifying scheme rooted in racial exploitation is taking place at the household he’s vacationing at. Seamlessly blending horror and satirical dark comedy, Peele bluntly shines a light on the quiet brutality of liberal white supremacy by showing the insidious belly of certain ‘polite’ social interactions, before allowing the film to explode into an unforgettable commentary on on race, control, and power in contemporary America.
Get Out (Peele, 2017) – 15th December
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: ALIEN0089
A young gamer records a testimonial to expose the harassment she faces in an online war game in Chilean filmmaker Valeria Hofmann’s techno-horror short AliEN0089 (2023). But, as she speaks, a stranger infiltrates her home and hijacks her computer, collapsing the distance between the digital world and her physical one with chaotic consequences.
Drawing from real testimony and the unrest that marked Chile in 2019, AliEN0089 channels these inspirations into a techno-horror vision to explore how virtual identities are formed, and what is transferred or lost when crossing between the digital and the physical realms.
AliEN0089 (Hoffman, 2023) – 1st December
MUBI UK & IRELAND DECEMBER 2025
01/12/2025 | The Apartment | Billy Wilder | New Year’s TBD
01/12/2025 | Phantom Thread | Paul Thomas Anderson | Hungry For Love: Two by Paul Thomas Anderson
01/12/2025 | Written on The Wind | Douglas Sirk
01/12/2025 | Bottoms | Emma Seligman
01/12/2025 | Women Talking | Sarah Polley
03/12/2025 | The New Years: Episode 1 | Rodrigo Sorogoyen | The New Years
03/12/2025 | The New Years: Episode 2 | Sandra Romero | The New Years
05/12/2025 | AliEN0089 | Valeria Hofmann | Brief Encounters
10/12/2025 | The New Years: Episode 3 | Sandra Romero | The New Years
10/12/2025 | Zama | Lucrezia Martel
12/12/2025 | The Mastermind | Kelly Reichardt
12/12/2025 | The Cathedral | Ricky D’Ambrose
12/12/2025 | Festen | Thomas Vinterberg
15/12/2025 | When Harry Met Sally | Rob Reiner
15/12/2025 | 45 Years | Andrew Haigh
15/12/2025 | Bad Tales | Damiano D’Innocenzo, Fabio D’Innocenzo
15/12/2025 | Get Out | Jordan Peele
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