Conor Marsh lives a secluded life with his dog, Sandy, until one day he begins playing Obex, a new, state-of-the-art computer game. When Sandy goes missing, the line between reality and game blurs and Conor must venture into the strange world of OBEX to bring her home.

Baltimore-based writer-director Albert Birney (Strawberry Mansion, 2021 Sundance Film Festival) returns with another delightfully skewed and surreal lo-fi fantasy. Set in pre-internet 1987 and strikingly shot in monochromatic black and white, the film depicts Conor’s (Birney) lonely existence of solitary screen time, transfixed by early Macs with slowly rendering graphics and TVs aglow with the horror movie late show.

Matching these hypnotic images, Birney immerses us in a dense soundscape of warm droning synths, clacking keyboards, malevolent static, chirping cicadas, and the click and whine of dot matrix printers. The film’s dreamy nostalgia soon becomes an analog nightmare as Conor finds himself trapped in a low-tech but high-stakes video game. 

A long-awaited dream to play on the big screen, god-level director John Woo’s Hong Kong action masterpiece, Hard Boiled, is finally coming to The Frida Cinema with a brand new 4K restoration!

Mobsters are smuggling guns into Hong Kong. The police orchestrate a raid at a teahouse where an ace detective loses his partner. Meanwhile, the two main gun smugglers are having a war over territory, and a young new gun is enlisted to wipe out informants and overcome barriers to growth. The detective, acting from inside sources, gets closer to the ring leaders and eventually must work with the inside man directly.

Hard Boiled is routinely placed in the top tier of action cinema, not just of the 1990s, not just of Hong Kong, but of all time. For many critics and fans, it represents the peak of John Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” era, combining balletic gunplay and emotional melodrama that filmmakers ripped off for decades to come.

We’ve been waiting to give you the good news for months: legendary director Lav Diaz’s new film, Magellan, is finally sailing on over to The Frida Cinema!

At the dawn of the modern era, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) navigated a fleet of ships to Southeast Asia, attempting the first voyage across the vast Pacific Ocean. On reaching the Malay Archipelago, the crew pushed to the brink of madness in the harshness of the high seas and overwhelming natural beauty of the islands, Magellan’s obsession leads to a rebellion and reckoning with the consequences of power.

A vast, globe-spanning epic from Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (Norte, The End Of History), Magellan presents the colonization of the Philippines as a primal, shocking encounter with the unknown and a radical retelling of European narratives of discovery and exploration.

Akira Kurosawa kicked off the 1960s with his underrated film noir piece The Bad Sleep Well, screening at The Frida Cinema as part of our ongoing retrospective on the works of the legendary Japanese director.

The story is simple: a vengeful young man marries the daughter of a corrupt industrialist in order to seek justice for his father’s suicide. What follows is a film that combines elements of Hamlet and noir to chilling effect in exposing the corrupt boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan. 

Continuing his legendary collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, The Bad Sleep Well is a lesser-known stroke of genius in the filmmaker’s canon, but great nonetheless. See it on the big screen, where it rarely plays!