Master animator Satoshi Kon’s masterpiece, Perfect Blue, returns to The Frida’s screen for some well-deserved encores! If you missed it the first time around, come see this amazing restoration from our friends at GKIDS on the big screen!

Former pop idol Mima Kirigoe (voiced by Junko Iwao) leaves her idol group to pursue acting. But as she trades microphones for movie sets, the lines between her past and present blur: a mysterious website chronicling her every move appears, an obsessed fan creeps closer, and the roles she plays begin to swallow who she thought she was. The camera follows Mima into a mirror-maze of perception and performance, where even the reflection cannot be trusted.

Rich with acute unease, Perfect Blue remains a landmark of adult animation—its influence stretching from horror to cinema and animation alike. With every cut-frame and every whispered echo, it undermines the fantasy of stardom and forces the audience to ask: Who am I when they’re watching?

Have a very Terry Christmas, ya’ll! The Frida Cinema is excited to present a double feature of two wildly imaginative Terry Gilliam classics, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, now celebrating their 40th and 30th anniversaries, respectively, with new 4K restorations!

Brazil (1985): A satirical fever dream of paperwork, plumbing, and paranoia, Brazil follows low-level clerk Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) as he stumbles into a deadly web of mistaken identity and resistance in a dystopia held together by duct tape and denial. With its baroque production design, razor-sharp humor, and unforgettable performances from Robert De Niro and Katherine Helmond, Brazil remains one of the great cinematic critiques of authoritarian absurdity. Forty years later, its vision of a future overwhelmed by incompetence feels both prophetic and painfully funny.

Twelve Monkeys (1995): Gilliam’s time-twisting thriller stars Bruce Willis as a prisoner sent back in time to stop a plague, only to question reality itself. Brad Pitt delivers one of his most electrifying performances as the unstable Jeffrey Goines, and Madeleine Stowe anchors the film with emotional intelligence. Twelve Monkeys fuses noir, sci-fi, and psychological horror into a gripping examination of memory, fate, and the thin line between sanity and prophecy. Three decades on, it’s as tense, inventive, and unsettling as ever.

This special anniversary double feature pairs the director’s most iconic visions of bureaucratic madness and apocalyptic fate, presented back-to-back on the big screen right where they belong.

The Last Class is a nuanced and deeply personal portrait of master educator Robert Reich teaching his final course and reflecting on a period of immense transformation, personally and globally. It is a love letter to education. The former Secretary of Labor might be famous for his public service, best-selling books, and viral social media posts, but he always considered teaching his true calling. Now, after over 40 years and an extraordinary 40,000 students, Reich is preparing for his last class.

Over the course of the film, Reich confronts the impending finality, and his own aging, with increasing candor, introspection, and, ultimately, emotion. He displays a rawness of feeling he has never shared publicly before. Drawing on his lifetime in politics, he uses his class, “Wealth and Poverty,” to offer us all a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society. One thousand students fill the biggest lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, the last class to receive Reich’s wisdom and exhortations not to accept that the world has to stay the way it is. His belief in the next generation’s ability to take on the fight is inspiring.