The 20 Best Movies to Watch on Mubi

Mubi might not be as widely known as other streaming services, but it’s quietly becoming a more essential brand to the theatrical and home-entertainment markets with each passing year. After The Substance was notoriously dumped by Universal, Mubi swept in to save it and the movie went on to be nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress and win the Oscar for Best Makeup. It was just the latest hit for a company that also distributed last year’s excellent Dahomey, Ira Sachs’s Passages, Aki Kaursimaki’s Fallen Leaves, Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, and Andrea Arnold’s Bird. The service places recent international art-house critical darlings alongside some of the most beloved films of all time in a constantly rotating catalogue. We’re here to guide the way to the best with regular updates.

45 Years

Year: 2015
Runtime: 1h 35m
Director: Andrew Haigh

The director of All of Us Strangers adapted the short story “In Another Country,” by David Constantine, delivering a heartbreaking drama that landed the timeless Charlotte Rampling an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (which she should have won). She plays an ordinary woman whose life is upended when her husband (Tom Courtenay) receives a letter about the discovery of the body of a woman he dated almost five decades earlier. She learns things about her husband she never considered, and everything she thought about her final years starts to unravel.

Bird

Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 59m
Director: Andrea Arnold

The writer-director of Fish Tank and American Honey made one of the most underrated films of 2024 in this delicate story of magical realism. Newcomer Nykiya Adams plays Bailey, a 12-year-old who lives with her single father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), and meets a mysterious figure played by the excellent Franz Rogowski. Bird has elements of Arnold’s other works, but it’s a tender drama nonetheless.

Boyhood

Year: 2014
Runtime: 2h 45m
Director: Richard Linklater

From 2002 to 2013, Richard Linklater gathered the stars of Boyhood to chart the growth of Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) without the use of CGI. Ethan Hawke was nominated for an Oscar and Patricia Arquette won the Academy Award for their unforgettable work as Mason’s parents. There’s never been a movie quite like Boyhood, and it’s hard to believe that it’s almost as old as the time it took to make it.

Breaking the Waves

Year: 1996
Runtime: 2h 33m
Director: Lars von Trier

There are a few LvT movies and shows on Mubi (The Kingdom hive, mount up!), but this is the one that really put him on the international map. Co-written and directed by international cinema’s problem child, it’s the story of a woman forced to emotional and physical extremes by her paralyzed husband. Emily Watson does the best work of her career in the Oscar-nominated lead role.

Burning

Year: 2018
Runtime: 2h 28m
Director: Lee Chang-Dong

Among the best foreign-language films of 2018; it should definitely be seen by anyone who fell in love with Steven Yeun’s Oscar-nominated work for Minari or has been captivated by his work on Beef or The Walking Dead. This is his best performance to date in a notable career. Lee Chang-dong adopts a novella by Haruki Murakami into a riveting dissection of class and gender in modern Korea. Yeun is mesmerizing as the mysterious Ben, someone who our protagonist starts to think might be a killer. Don’t miss this one.

Certified Copy

Year: 2010
Runtime: 1h 46m
Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami died too young in 2016, but he left a notable library of great works, including Close-Up, A Taste of Cherry, and his final film, 24 Frames. However, the best work of his career is sitting right there on Mubi to introduce you to his filmography. This 2010 drama is a riveting movie about a woman (Juliette Binoche) and man (William Shimell) who seem to be meeting and flirting for the first time … but then maybe not. Kiarostami plays with the very nature of how relationships are captured on film in one of the best films of the ’10s.

Dahomey

Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 8m
Director: Mati Diop

One of the best documentaries of 2024 is the story of the return of stolen artifacts to the Kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) from the French government that took them. At times, Mati Diop imagines the POV of an ancient Dahomey statue, but her film really achieves greatness when it lands on a discussion by students at the University of Abomey-Calavi that unpacks the complex issues at the center of this film.

Decision to Leave

Year: 2022
Runtime: 2h 19m
Director: Park Chan-wook

The director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden co-wrote and helmed this Hitchcockian thriller about a detective (Park Hae-il) who falls for a suspect, played brilliantly by Tang Wei. Park drenches this film in style, keeping audiences engaged in the kind of gorgeously twisted thriller that people complain doesn’t get made anymore.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Year: 2023
Runtime: 2h 44m
Director: Radu Jude

This is the best dark comedy you probably haven’t seen. For the first half of the film, we follow a woman named Angela (Ilinca Manolache) while she interviews people for a film about workplace safety. As she drives around Budapest, she often films videos in her role as an influencer with a video-filtered face that makes her seem like any number of idiots inspired by Andrew Tate. And then Radu Jude drops the hammer in the second part as we see the filming of the safety video and realize it’s not about protecting people as much as corporations.

The Fall 

Year: 2006
Runtime: 1h 59m
Director: Tarsem Singh

One of the best films of the aughts was largely unavailable for years, and is still unreleased on Blu-ray, but Mubi remastered it and theatrically rereleased it in 2024 in gorgeous 4K. Lee Pace stars as a stuntman who befriends a young girl (Catinca Untaru) at a hospital, distracting her by recounting gorgeously shot tales of a group battling a vicious tyrant. This is an unforgettably beautiful motion picture.

Fallen Leaves

Year: 2023
Runtime: 1h 21m
Director: Aki Kaurismäki

The king of deadpan comedy’s 20th film is one of his best — a gentle character study about an unexpected couple. Alma Pöysti stars as Ansa, a single woman in Helsinki who meets a single man named Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). The two get close but at a very Kaurismäki pace. This is one of the Finnish master’s most earnest and rewarding motion pictures.

Frances Ha

Year: 2012
Runtime: 1h 26m
Director: Noah Baumbach

It’s been a minute since Baumbach made waves on his own (Barbie excluded), but we’ll always have his 2010s run to tide us over. This breakthrough critical darling probably contains what is still Greta Gerwig’s best onscreen performance as a 27-year-old New York dancer who is trying to get her life together. Funny and relatable, this was one of the most acclaimed films of 2012.

Grand Theft Hamlet

Year: 2025
Runtime: 1h 31m
Directors: Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane

During COVID-19, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen attempted something crazy: Staging a version of Hamlet within the world of Grand Theft Auto Online. This documentary unfolds entirely within the video game, but it’s for more than just gamers, as it touches on the power of connection and the way that art can cut across generations and thousands of miles to unite us.

Happening

Year: 2021
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director: Audrey Diwan

Anamaria Vartolomei is breathtaking as Anne, an average student in France in 1963. Adapted from the memoir by Annie Ernaux, this is the story of the trauma surrounding getting an abortion in the ’60s in France, before it was legal. Vartolomei is fearless in a story that’s both powerful and timely as the war on bodily autonomy continues to rage.

Monster

Year: 2023
Runtime: 2h 1m
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda

The masterful director of films like After Life and Shoplifters released this drama in 2023 to a muted reception, but that’s because people have been spoiled by the heights that Koreeda has reached in the past. This thriller stars Sakura Andō as a mother dealing with a changing child and the school that doesn’t seem to know what to do with him. It’s a very moving drama, made all the more powerful by the gorgeous final score of Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Passages

Year: 2023
Runtime: 1h 32m
Director: Ira Sachs

The director of Love Is Strange wrote and directed this very personal tale of a filmmaker who discovers he can’t control the sexual partners who have shaped his life. Franz Rogowski plays Tomas, who is married to Ben Whishaw’s Martin but becomes infatuated with a teacher named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). To say things get messy would be an understatement.

Phoenix

Year: 2014
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director: Christian Petzold

One of the best films of the 2010s, this drama stars Nina Hoss as a woman who survived Auschwitz and returns home to Berlin with a reconstructed face after a wound. Her husband, who turned her in, doesn’t recognize her. Hitchcock would have loved this haunting noir, a picture with one of the best endings in film history.

The Substance

Year: 2024
Runtime: 2h 21m
Director: Coralie Fargeat

Mubi’s biggest hit yet stars Golden Globe winner Demi Moore as a woman who knows she is being pushed out of the image-conscious world of entertainment. She signs up for the Substance, which allows a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) to take her place, alternating existence one week at a time. Things go very wrong in a movie that gets increasingly bonkers in ways that you won’t soon forget.

Two Days, One Night

Year: 2014
Runtime: 1h 35m
Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne wrote and directed the biggest hit of their careers in this 2014 drama starring Marion Cotillard as a woman who has to essentially beg her co-workers to keep her job. The Dardennes make deeply compassionate and humanist films that turn average people into indelible film characters, and Cotillard does the best work of her career here. She was nominated for the Oscar (and should have won).

Wendy and Lucy

Year: 2008
Runtime: 1h 21m
Director: Kelly Reichardt

Michelle Williams gives one of the best performances of her career as a vagrant whose only real friend is her dog Lucy. On their way to Alaska, the two become separated, and Wendy strives to reunite with the pet she so desperately needs. Kelly Reichardt makes beautiful, character-driven films, and this is one of her best.