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.

Our dearly beloved Director Of Operations, Martin, is leaving us at the conclusion of this year, so we wanted to give him a proper sendoff by letting him program four of his favorite films. The second film in his series, entitled The Last Dance, is the 2018 film An Elephant Sitting Still, from director Hung Bo. 

In the Northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longer-for escape from the situation they find themselves in.

A gloomy, nihilistic mediation on life, An Elephant Sitting Still is a programmer’s dream to be able to play on the big screen. Thank you again to Martin for picking this under-seen downward spiraling masterpiece.