I love films. I have since I was a boy. I’m a big grown man now. Headed into my fifties.I think I’m well versed with good storytelling.When you watch output from Netflix, Prime, Sky etc…..there is a lot of it. A lot. And one tends to find films fall into predictable genres and originality, in storytelling, is simply lost or regurgitated from something else.I am in the middle of film, on MUBI. A film I would NEVER have discovered and therefore watched. They beauty of the MUBI model has to be it’s curation. The mere fact that films are being chosen by people who love story telling. They know that big budget blah blah blah can become hype….style over substance.Here, they take substance and show you style.You know those words….”surprise me”…..with a caveat of something good….something interesting…….well done MUBI, you really have done that.If you are a film fan, looking for engaging films that aren’t the mainstream over hyped output, then take a trial and see what you’ll discover.I use the Apple TV app. It’s polished, very easy to use and not overwhelming (like say Netflix) with huge amounts of content.Thank you (once again) for being different. Keep going.

The bad;Sometimes films just won’t play, I downloaded ’one second’ and now it won’t let me watch it due to an error. Sometimes films take hours to download because the file sizes vary drastically, and when clicking ‘fast download’ rather then ‘best quality’ nothing seems to change. The user interface isn’t bad but it’s not great either, I think you should have another tab for your watchlist, as the only way to see your list is by looking at the settings. Im really into indie and foreign films but the price for monthly subscription is a little steep for the quality of the app at this moment in time.The good;Best thing about this app is that once you watch a film, you can gift that film to a friend via email which allows them to watch it for 48hours. The app gives you a wide variety of films you normally couldn’t watch on regular streaming sites and in cinemas. The app plays more like a reading article which is helpful when finding out about the film, it’s cast and vision of the directors. I like how it gives you daily recommendations. I like the film description, the staffs interpretation of it and also allows you to view a trailer for every film available.

I have been a Mubi costumer for years, since well before it was popular and it had its own distribution / production rights. They started with a simple but key concept: “less is more” and that curation was way better than algorithms. One new curated movie each day. Now, beyond the fact that they continue too have good auteur cinema, their platform has become as any other: a bunch of movies that rarely changes, they have more than 30 movies, yes, but no new movie is added each day. “Curation” is now limited to a series of random lists that anyone could assemble, except for the occasional retrospective of some director, which sometimes stays on the home screen for over a month. Honestly at this point the only reason I am keeping Mubi is the fact that I live in London and can use Mubi GO, which is the only actual curation left: a free ticket for one selected movie a week. The fact that they have been part of some really good productions does not compensate this horrible change they made. If we wanted an streaming platform that a couple times a year releases some good production and the rest of the year you pay to have access to the SAME bunch of movies over and over there already tons of them.

I don’t like Mubi for two reasons: firstly the selection isn’t great (there’s only about fifteen films at any given time) and, secondly, I really hate the way they only last a week or so. The app also seems to rub it in by showing films that were previously on the service but are no longer available. It appears to be designed for an incredibly niche audience of people whose knowledge of cinema is such that, not only have they seen all the classic English-language features, but they’ve seen every one of the foreign-language pictures of note too! I say this as someone who has seen a lot of foreign-language films, but Mubi doesn’t give films you’ve even vaguely heard of, and when you do come across a director you’re interested in, it’s normally an esoteric choice from the start or end of their career that no one is interested in seeing unless they simply are completists. I wouldn’t be lying if I said the curation felt deliberately abstruse and, at times, laughably pretentious. I would suggest to anyone but the most devoted film buff to go with the BFiPlayer instead - not a perfect app by any means, but with a far larger, more comprehensive and longer-lasting collection of films.