Let’s be real. You’re not going to love every film you ever watch and you won’t love every film mubi puts up on the platform. I can count on one hand the amount of five star films I’ve viewed on mubi among the many I’ve seen so far. I’ve used the service off and on for about a year and I have to say my most recent subscription is likely going to stick. I’ve started getting into more hidden gems and true independently made cinema and mubi is the one mainstream streaming service that is making a concerted effort to bring you movies you would never discover otherwise. On top of all that they are distributing some of the most mesmerizing contemporary cinema themselves (The Worst Person in the World, Drive my Car, Aftersun, Decision to Leave, etc.) and I adore everything they are doing. The only other service I would personally recommend is the Criterion Channel for quality programming but mubi is 100% making a play for that crown in my book!

Mubi is unlike any other platform, with movies you can’t find in any other platforms. It opened a whole new world of cinema for me and for that I’m grateful. However, Mubi has one undeniable problem. The subtitles are bad. There’s just no other way to say it. I speak more than one language and noticed the subtitles did not translate correctly what was spoken by the characters. I could also notice this problem while watching movies in languages I didn’t even speak. Some sentences were not translated at all. The character would deliver their line and no subtitles were there to indicate whatever was being said. All of this made me very insecure while watching foreign language movies. I was always wondering if the sentences in the subtitles were actually the sentences being spoken. Or had the meaning - the subtlety of the dialogue - been lost to me? Could I trust these subtitles or were they pointing me in the wrong direction? It was almost impossible for me to know during that armenian movie last week and I also had a hard time guessing during that one in mandarin. However, I keep signing Mubi every month, a bit skeptical of the subtitles, but hopeful nonetheless. Maybe this review will reach the eyes of someone who can fix this problem. Maybe just the eyes of a casual viewer who will now be as suspicious as me. Hope it was helpful either way.

I’m truly in love with this streaming service. The movies that I find on here are carefully and respectfully curated for me to watch. If I didn’t have MUBI, I’m sure I’d have a much harder time finding these movies. That being said there’s something about MUBI that kind of rubs me the wrong way. Every month, I have a system where I watch movies that are leaving streaming services that I’m subscribed to. Not every streaming service announces what titles they’re getting rid of, but MUBI is one that does. My problem is that they don’t tell you at the beginning of a particular month what movies they’re getting rid of. Instead, they tell you which movies they’re getting rid of in the next 12 - 13 days. This impedes my program a bit. I’m sure there’s a particular reason they do this, but nevertheless if they could tell you at the beginning of the month which of their titles they’re getting rid of, I wish they’d do that instead. And I would think the service better for doing so. Ultimately I have the utmost respect for the people working at MUBI. I will always be a loyal subscriber.

So I see talk of millennials and Gen Z and I think, geez I’m a Gen X and a white girl and this looks a lot like my time at Ohio State in the 80s. True, I don’t know what it’s like to be bi racial, but still I could feel Riley’s multi dimensional self hate, being rejected not only by a white boy but by an Asian boy too (and you want to scream at her: “So what if he’s cute? He’s a skater dude, dumb, he plays video games!”). The doofus white ex boyfriend w whom she fights outside (and I too love the female passerby tells him no one asked him to talk— something I’ve wanted to tell about 4,000 white guys in the last 40 years)— this scene is great, bc she’s so angry, properly, at him, but then sees the absurdity of their situation. Her anxiety attack at home? With her parents? So real. Again, I understand the element of racism is something I’ll never understand, but this is still the female college senior’s Every[wo]man story, finding yourself humiliated over and over without understanding why. And when her sister says, “It must be boring being so sad all the time,” you realize she just doesn’t understand…. Yet.