Top image: still, Southland Tales (2006), dir. Richard Kelly / courtesy of Fondazione Prada

When the world first moved into lockdown, Fondazione Prada – the Italian brand’s renowned cultural institution – was quick to respond, digitising parts of its program immediately and promising to continue. Now, more details of its collaboration with arthouse-streaming giant MUBI, which is set to go live next Monday, 5th April, have been officially revealed.

Entitled Perfect Failures, the carefully-curated selection “spotlight films that were widely misunderstood upon their original release”, but which largely gained cult followings as time passed. The aim, according to Prada’s press release, is to “prove that a movie’s original reception is not the final word on its true value, as happened to these films initially greeted with confusion, rejection and repulsion.”

The series launches on April 5th with Southland Tales (2006), a sci-fi satire which fictionalises World War III with a cast including Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Justin Timberlake – and the results are exactly as weird and wacky as you would expect. Next comes a series of cult classics: Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), a beguiling love story starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, followed swiftly by the gloriously camp classic Fedora (1978), which sees a struggling director attempt to lure an eccentric, reclusive actress out of hibernation.

Next comes Kelly Reindhardt’s 2013 drama Night Moves, which depicts a series of radical environmentalists on an extreme mission, followed swiftly by Chantal Akerman’s A Couch In New York (1996), a transatlantic comedy centred around an American psychoanalyst and a Parisian dancer who decide to swap homes.

The series wraps up in glamorous fashion with the underrated, brilliantly overblown Showgirls, which chronicles the struggles of a Vegas showgirl fighting to ascend the ranks of her erotic, enthralling industry. It’s the cherry on top of a seriously stylish series, which follows up on Fondazione Prada’s promise to bring us art, culture and entertainment even throughout lockdown.

Perfect Failures launches on MUBI next Monday, April 5th.