The Testament of Orpheus is the final film in our Jean Cocteau series—a dreamlike self-portrait where the artist literally walks through his own creations. Time bends, reality slips, and Cocteau—the mythmaker—steps in front of the camera to reflect on art, death, and immortality in a world of symbols and shadows.

Part sequel, part epilogue to Orpheus, the film brings back familiar faces (including Jean Marais and María Casares), and introduces cameos from Cocteau’s contemporaries, including Pablo Picasso and Jean-Pierre Léaud. It’s a meditation on legacy and the surreal power of cinema to blur what is real and what is imagined.

Shot in luminous black and white among ruins and strange halls, The Testament Of Orpehus is less a narrative than a moving poem—an invitation into the inner sanctum of one of the 20th century’s greatest visionaries.

Film Movement Classics is bringing a brand new 4K restoration of Masayuki’s Suo 1996 charmer Shall We Dance? to The Frida Cinema!

Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) seems to have it all – a high-paying job as an accountant, a beautiful home, a caring wife and a doting daughter he loves
dearly. However, he feels something is missing in his life. One day while commuting on the train he spots a beautiful woman staring wistfully out a
window and eventually decides to find her. His search leads him head-first into the world of competitive ballroom dancing.

A box office sensation in North America upon its initial release (which led to a Hollywood remake with Richard Gere), Film Movement Classics is presenting the original 137-minute film, available uncut for the first time in North America.

A titan of repertory cinema, Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece Heat, is back at The Frida Cinema for some August encores!

A towering epic of crime and consequence, Heat is the film where everything came together: De Niro vs. Pacino, Mann at full power, and Los Angeles lit like a dream you don’t want to wake up from. It’s a genre-defining masterpiece that changed the way crime films look, sound, and move.

Robert De Niro is Neil McCauley, a master thief planning one last score. Al Pacino is Vincent Hanna, the obsessive LAPD detective on his trail. Their lives orbit each other in parallel—both masters of their craft, both isolated by it. When they finally sit down face-to-face in a now-legendary diner scene, the movie bends time around them.

With a killer ensemble cast (our beloved Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Tom Sizemore, Diane Venora, Natalie Portman, Jon Voight, and many more), an iconic synth-and-guitar score by Elliot Goldenthal, and shootouts that redefine the word intense, Heat is more than a crime film–it’s pure cinema.

The third film in our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Woman in the Dunes, a film about an entomologist on a casual field trip that finds himself lured into a nightmarish existence—trapped in a sand dune with a mysterious woman and forced into a Sisyphean task of survival. What begins as a bizarre circumstance becomes a harrowing philosophical inquiry into time, identity, and the illusion of freedom.

Based on the novel by Kōbō Abe, and brought to life by Hiroshi Teshigahara’s stark, surreal direction and Torū Takemitsu’s haunting score, Woman in the Dunes is a landmark of Japan’s 1960s avant-garde cinema. Nominated for two Academy Awards and winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, it’s both a psychological thriller and a profound existential riddle.

Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. Each Monday this July-September, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century! All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles!