Notebook

Like the seas he captured through his career, the films of the French iconoclast are constantly moving, and everything moves within them. Jean Epstein. Illustration by Leonardo Goi. Jean Epstein was an aquatic filmmaker, an artist who saw water as embodying the kind of cinema he aspired to create: fluid, tempestuous, unpredictable.

"The Odyssey" director’s heroes fight to achieve normal lives—but then spectacle obliterates the ordinary. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023). In what has to be one of the earlier instances of literary criticism, Herodotus wrote that it was Homer “who gave to Greece its gods.” By this, he did not mean that The Iliad and The Odyssey gave the Greeks an entire theology but rather that these epic poems gave a form and a function to the myth of the gods.

What does it really mean to set off? In this season of MUBI Podcast: Contemporary Italian Voices, Isabella Ragonese explores the road movie as a metaphor for transformation. Joined by guests from the worlds of film and culture, she reflects on how every journey, whether physical or inward, profoundly changes the traveler, often more than the destination itself. Childhood is the first great journey of our lives.

This week’s essential news, articles, sounds, videos, and more from the film world. Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on X and Instagram. NEWS Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019). The Venice Film Festival has unveiled its 2026 lineup, which includes new work by Lav Diaz, Lee Chang-dong, and Werner Herzog.

Roberto Rossellini and Kenji Mizoguchi picture the devastation of postwar Axis nations. Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946). The camera lingers: on a partisan’s body drifting down the Po river in Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (Paisà, 1946), and then—eight years later—on an old man gathering kelp alone along the shore of the island of Sado in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō Dayū, 1954). In each, a single figure is held in a long, distant take, and becomes our way into a nation’s suffering.

The filmmaker and professor’s summer visit shows why his unclassifiable films offer a path toward a freer, more human cinema in the AI era. Jean-Pierre Gorin in New York. Photo by Carlos Valladares. Throughout New York City’s electoral sweeps by the democratic socialists, Knicks game celebrations, and rumblings of World Cups and Odysseys to come, Jean-Pierre Gorin has maintained an unbothered air.

"It feels so liberating to think of film outside the frame as being cinematic." Five Inspirations is a series in which we ask directors to share five things that shaped and informed their film. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (2025) is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries. INSPIRATION #1 Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995) Possibly the biggest influence on how I conceptualize ghosts or spectrality. Yes, Hou’s film is not a ghost film, not even remotely a horror film.

"It feels so liberating to think of film outside the frame as being cinematic." Five Inspirations is a series in which we ask directors to share five things that shaped and informed their film. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachok’s A Useful Ghost (2025) is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries. INSPIRATION #1 Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995) Possibly the biggest influence on how I conceptualize ghosts or spectrality. Yes, Hou’s film is not a ghost film, not even remotely a horror film.

Taking place during a heatwave, Il Cinema Ritrovato's festival of restorations and revivals soothed the soul while gelato cooled the body. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927). It’s a badly kept secret that Il Cinema Ritrovato is as much a culinary pilgrimage as a cinematic one, seducing throngs of cinephiles to the landlocked northern Italian city of Bologna with a sprawling showcase of restorations and new discoveries devoted to resurrecting and expanding film history.

The state of (video) art at the 61st Venice Biennale. Elegy - for two ancestors (Gabrielle Goliath, 2024), performance, Sale d’Armi, Arsenale, Venice. Photo by J Macdonald. The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale opened in the middle of a storm—both literally and metaphorically.