Hot off of its 10 Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Editing, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design, The Frida Cinema is proud to present Brady Corbet’s audacious masterwork The Brutalist!

Escaping post-war Europe, visionary architect László Tóth arrives in America to rebuild his life, his work, and his marriage to his wife Erzsébet after being forced apart during wartime by shifting borders and regimes. On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren recognizes his talent for building. But power and legacy come at a heavy cost.

All screenings of The Brutalist will include a 15 minute intermission.

Join us for a very special screening of the new documentary Time Passages with an in-person Q&A with director Kyle Henry after the screening! 

A pandemic rages across the globe. In the final months of his mother Elaine’s late-stage dementia, gay filmmaker Kyle Henry uses his extensive family archive to travel back in time, exploring the complicated bonds of identity, history, and belonging in his large Texas family. Charting Elaine’s promising early life through her years of motherhood and self-sacrifice, finally tracing their relationship to its inevitable end.

Time Passages explores Kyle’s conflicting feelings of love, grief, guilt, and helplessness. Beneath the Kodachrome smiles and grainy Super-8 home movies lie the difficult truths that so many families hide. With their unearthing, Time Passages becomes a memento mori: a testament to love, legacy and the things that carry us through life’s most challenging times.

Preach (Glynn Turman), an aspiring writer, and Cochise (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), a talented basketball player with a bright future, navigate the joys and challenges of adolescence in their predominantly Black neighborhood. Their carefree days of mischief, romance, and camaraderie take a tragic turn after a series of poor decisions lead to unforeseen consequences, testing their friendship and shaping their paths.

Renowned for its authentic portrayal of youth, the film features a soulful Motown soundtrack and is celebrated as a groundbreaking work in Black cinema.

Concrete Dreams: Black Identity in the Urban Frame is a series that explores the profound relationship between Black Cinema and the cities that shape its narratives. Each film in the series not only tells a compelling story, but also positions the urban environment as a central character—its streets, culture, and communities influencing the lives, struggles, and triumphs of its inhabitants. By highlighting stories that intertwine identity, culture, and place, this series invites audiences to reflect on the dynamic interplay between people and the environments they call home, showcasing how these cities pulse through the heart of Black storytelling.

Our Wong Kar-Wai Month series continues with Chungking Express, the director’s timeless 1994 romance.

The film weaves together two distinct yet thematically linked stories of two lovelorn policemen. In the first, He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), reeling from a breakup, becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin), who is entangled in the criminal underworld. The second story follows Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), whose heartbreak over a flight attendant ex-girlfriend is softened by the quirky and free-spirited Faye (Faye Wong), a café worker who secretly transforms his life.

Continuing to shine a spotlight on our dearly departed David Lynch, we have added final encores of his unsung masterpiece Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

In the town of Twin Peaks, everyone has their secrets—but especially Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, following her through the last week of her life and teasing out the enigmas that surround her murder. Homecoming queen by day and drug-addicted thrill seeker by night, Laura leads a double life that pulls her deeper and deeper into horror as she pieces together the identity of the assailant who has been terrorizing her for years.

Nightmarish in its vision of an innocent torn apart by unfathomable forces, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is nevertheless one of Lynch’s most humane films, aching with compassion for its tortured heroine—a character as enthralling in life as she was in death.

Wong Kar-Wai Month winds down with the director’s neon-soaked dramedy Fallen Angels.

The film intertwines two loosely connected stories: a disillusioned hitman who contemplates leaving his dangerous profession and his enigmatic female partner who silently yearns for him, and a mute ex-convict who runs an unconventional business and finds himself entangled with a free-spirited woman searching for her own purpose. Through its fragmented narrative, kinetic cinematography, and surreal atmosphere, the story captures the yearning for human connection amid the alienation of urban life