This August, The Frida Cinema proudly presents Greenaway & Nyman, a film series celebrating four of the most iconic collaborations between filmmaker Peter Greenaway and composter Michael Nyman. We close our series with Greenaway’s 1989 masterpiece The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a lurid, operatic masterpiece of gluttony, sumptuous beauty, and brutal vengeance, all set to Nyman’s famously haunting score, and almost entirely within the lavish confines of a French restaurant.

Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), a grotesquely boorish gangster, terrorizes guests and staff with his vulgarity and violence night after night at a fancy restaurant named Le Hollandais. His long-suffering wife Georgina (Helen Mirren), who quietly endures his abuse, begins a passionate affair with a gentle bookseller (Alan Howard), meeting him in secret among the restaurant’s corridors, kitchens, and storerooms. What unfolds is a richly stylized operatic tragedy, with color-coded sets that shift with each room, vibrant costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and one of Michael Nyman’s most iconic scores.

The Italian coming-of-age film Diciannove is making its way to The Frida Cinema!

The highs and lows of a restless youth collide headlong into the concrete realities of adulthood when Leonardo, a teenager from Palermo leaves home for the first time. His studies land him in Siena, by way of London, where he clashes with his instructor, the curriculum, and most chaotically, with himself. Produced by Luca Guadagnino, Diciannove (nineteen), marks the feature filmmaking debut of writer-director Giovanni Tortorici, a bold, brash and bemusing filmmaking talent.

Winner of the Queer Lion Award at Venice International Film Festival in 2024, Diciannove has been celebrated all over the world and is finally coming stateside!

As if! It’s been 30 years since Cher Horowitz first schooled us in the art of high school survival—and we’re celebrating it in style.

Amy Heckerling’s Clueless remains the ultimate ’90s teen comedy: sharp, stylish, and endlessly quotable. Follow Cher, Dionne, and the gang through Beverly Hills’ hallways and malls as they navigate friendship, fashion, and, of course, the quest to find the perfect date.

Shallow, rich and socially successful Cher is at the top of her Beverly Hills high school’s pecking scale. Seeing herself as a matchmaker, Cher first coaxes two teachers into dating each other. Emboldened by her success, she decides to give hopelessly klutzy new student Tai a makeover. When Tai becomes more popular than she is, Cher realizes that her disapproving ex-stepbrother was right about how misguided she was — and falls for him.

We’re cutting a little deeper with the second film in our Black Gloves & Crimson Blood series, straight into the subconscious of filmmaker Dario Argento with the nightmarish pairing of Four Flies On Grey Velvet and Door Into Darkness!

In Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the final entry in Argento’s “Animal Trilogy,” a rock drummer becomes ensnared in a blackmail plot that spirals into surreal paranoia and psychedelic dread. Rarely screened and long shrouded in cult mystique, it’s a slippery, dreamlike thriller featuring one of Argento’s most unforgettable death sequences.

Then: Door into Darkness, Argento’s rare foray into television. Acting as both host and creative force, he delivers a chilling episode that strips murder down to its most primal, procedural elements!

There will be a 15 minute intermission between the movies. One ticket purchase gets you access to both films.

Closing our the August portion of our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Demon Pond! The story follows a Tokyo academic that stumbles into a remote village with a strange obsession: the locals ring a bell daily to prevent a mythical dragon from rising from the nearby pond and flooding the region. What begins as eccentricity becomes uncanny, as the boundaries between folklore and madness begin to blur.

Adapted from Kyōka Izumi’s 1913 play and reimagined with a theatrical, dreamlike visual language by New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda, this is a ghost story told in the language of myth and ritual. Part parable, part fever dream, Demon Pond is less about monsters and more about what it means to believe—and what it costs to stop.

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!