Watch Cannes Critics Week films for free on MUBI

MUBI is showcasing dozens of features and short films through June 30. The selected movies will be free for the first 1000 views. A lot of unfamiliar titles on offer, so if anyone discovers a gem please post a brief capsule review in the comments. We’ll feature your best recommendations in rotation on the main page.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jeremie for these excellent synopses and suggestions. All but one of these films are still free to watch (and the cost to watch that one is only $1).

• A l’intérieur (Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo) – Not a perfect film but still quite a disturbing one. This is French horror cinema. Which is quite rare and definitely daring (and very gory). It also features the always amazingly filthy Beatrice Dalle (and Vanessa Paradis’ sister).
• Depuis qu’Otar est parti (Julie Bertucelli) – The first very promising feature of the director of The Tree. It’s a very beautiful and subtle story about family and generation, and Esther Gorintin playing the grand-mother is absolutely devastating.

• La baie du renard – A short film from the French actor Grégoire Colin. Really well directed, and the tensed atmosphere surrounding this indolent teenager on a wild and desolate seaside is perfectly captured.

• La vie des morts (Arnaud Desplechin) – First film of the best French director alive (IMHO). French auteur cinema at his best. You can see here most of the themes he will later develop in Kings & Queen, Comment Je Me Suis Disputé and A Christmas Tale.
• Lascars (Albert Pereira-Lazaro & Emmanuel Klotz) – A very funny and audacious animated film about a French “cité” in the summer. Think La Haine meets Belleville Rendez-Vous. And the voice cast is just great (Vincent Cassel, Diane Krueger…)
• Le Pornographe (Bertrand Bonello) – The second film of a Cannes regular. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays here an aging porn director who’s forced to get back in business. One of the best French film of this decade. Bold and visually stunning. Leaud is just wonderful, with this strange melancholy in his eyes and his look of eternal adolescent.
• Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July) – I don’t really need to present the great and the wonderful Miranda July. Watched it a thousand time. I cannot wait to see The Future.
• Reconstruction (Christoffer Boe) – I saw this a few years ago and even if I don’t remember everything about it, it certainly stayed with me. It won the Camera d’Or at Cannes. A strange and sad love story about two strangers meeting one night in a bar (or so you think). The direction, editing and sound are simply great and it’s the most impressive debut on screen I’ve seen since Lynch and LVT’s first films.
• The Great Ectasy of Robert Carmichael (Thomas Clay) – I’ve seen this one once just before moving to England, and at the time I really wish I hadn’t. I’ll probably never watch it again. Bleak and very disturbing, and with one of the most challenging sequence shot I’ve seen on screen. I’d definitely recommend it, but be prepared. Not an easy seat (Haneke meets Ken Loach)