Across our entire staff, if there was a movie we could all agree on being the definitive holiday season masterpiece of the past 25 years, it would be Todd Hayne’s Carol.

Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (are you kidding me?), the film is set in 1950s New York, and follows a shy young shopgirl and aspiring photographer, who becomes captivated by Carol Aird, an elegant woman trapped in a failing marriage. As the two grow closer, their connection deepens into a forbidden romance that threatens Carol’s custody battle for her daughter. Forced onto a road trip that becomes both an escape and a reckoning, the women must decide whether their love can survive the scrutiny and constraints of their time.

In the years since its release, Carol has become a pop-cultural touchstone that perfectly blends a holiday-season staple and  queer cinematic landmark. For pop culture purposes, it’s perhaps the most GIFed slow-burn romance of the internet age. Its influence can be seen all over the rise of prestige LGBTQ+ storytelling across screens big and small. Some movies change your life forever.

A candy-coated fever dream of holiday excess, Jim Carrey’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas is finally making its way to our screens!

When it hit theaters in 2000, How the Grinch Stole Christmas wasn’t just another family holiday movie — it was a full-blown pop-culture phenomenon. Ron Howard and his crew turned Dr. Seuss’s 1957 classic into a live-action spectacle dripping with turn-of-the-millennium maximalism. Carrey’s Grinch is still one of the great comic performances of the era mixing weird creature effects with a full-blown existential meltdown. It’s the role that cemented him as the only actor unafraid (or unhinged enough) to try to out-Seuss Dr. Seuss.

Two decades later, How the Grinch Stole Christmas remains a strange and wonderful artifact of a bygone blockbuster era: a holiday movie made with the scale of a theme-park ride. It was easy to write off a movie like this at the time, but honestly? I don’t think we realized how good we had it. 

Joe Dante’s Christmas time creature feature comedy Gremlins is one of our very favorite holiday films, so let’s play it again! 

The story begins when Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) receives a mysterious, adorable creature called a Mogwai as a Christmas gift from his father. With strict care instructions—no bright light, no water, and no feeding after midnight—Billy struggles to follow the rules, inadvertently unleashing a horde of mischievous, destructive gremlins on his quiet town. As the creatures wreak havoc, Billy and his girlfriend Kate (Phoebe Cates) race to stop the chaos and save their community.

Gremlins remains a beloved cult classic that redefined holiday-themed films and practically invented the need for the PG-13 rating. It’s funny, scary, and filled with holiday cheer all at the same time. 

The members have spoken! We know it only came out a couple of years ago, but our Members Only screening for December is The Holdovers!

A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.

Paul Giamatti’s performance as Paul Hunham cemented him as the most beloved sad-sack teacher since Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (which we are also playing in December!), Dominic Sessa’s breakthrough performance turned him into a sudden indie darling, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s heartbreaking turn became one of the year’s most celebrated, earning her an Oscar at the 2024 Academy Awards.

We love our Film Club Members, and our monthly exclusive Film Club Members Only screenings are just one of our ways of thanking them for their support! Not a Film Club Member yet? CLICK HERE to join our growing family of fellow film-lovers and Frida Cinema supporters!

The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit? More like The Bat, The Cat, and The Penguin! Tim Burton’s 1992 pop masterpiece Batman Returns is coming back to The Frida Cinema! We believe wholeheartedly that it’s the ultimate Christmas movie, filled to the brim with gothic spectacle and holiday glam. 

The monstrous Penguin, who dwells in the sewers beneath Gotham, joins up with corrupt mayoral candidate Max Shreck to topple the Batman once and for all. But when Shreck’s timid assistant Selina Kyle finds out, and Shreck tries to kill her, she’s transformed into the sexy Catwoman. She teams up with the Penguin and Shreck to destroy Batman, but sparks fly unexpectedly when she confronts the caped crusader.

With an all-star cast of Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Christopher Walken, and in incomparable Michelle Pfeiffer, Burton took the success of Batman (1989), and doubled down in the best way possible, creating the template that every sequel should strive for. 

One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an explora­tion of death. We are are closing out the December portion of our retrospective on the legendary director’sw work with a brand 4K restoration of it thanks to our friends at Janus Films! 

Takashi Shimura beautifully portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer who is impelled to find meaning in his final days. Presented in a radically conceived two­part structure and shot with a perceptive, humanistic clarity of vision, Ikiru is a multifaceted look at what it means to be alive.