Enter the world of visionary filmmaker Jean Cocteau, as we take you to where it all began–The Blood Of The Poet!

Part silent cinema séance, part avant-garde fever dream, The Blood of a Poet was made in collaboration with the legendary Vicomte de Noailles and shot in the aftermath of a scandalized art world, the film plays like a lucid dream you’re not entirely sure you woke from.

Banned, booed, and eventually canonized, The Blood of a Poet is not a film that explains itself. It folds in on itself—layered with Catholic iconography, queer longing, and the kind of experimental imagery that would echo through Lynch, Jarman, and surrealists for decades to come.

Celebrate the birthday of visionary director Jean Cocteau as we present a special run of Beauty and the Beast!

Born July 5th, 1889, Jean Cocteau was a poet, painter, playwright, and filmmaker whose imagination knew no borders—and no film better captures his singular vision than La Belle et la Bête (1946), a masterpiece of surreal romanticism that turns a fairy tale into living myth.

Starring Josette Day as the gentle, radiant Belle and the great Jean Marais as the tortured, leonine Beast, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast is a marvel of shadow, texture, and cinematic illusion. Made just after WWII on a shoestring budget and with raw ingenuity, the film conjures real magic without special effects. This isn’t Disney–it’s real cinema magic.

Celebrate 50 years of Robert Altman’s 1975 magnum opus, Nashville, as part of our Fireworks At The Frida series!

With unforgettable performances from Lily Tomlin, Karen Black, Keith Carradine, Ronee Blakley, and Henry Gibson, the film skips between recording studios, campaign buses, traffic jams, and concert stages—capturing a cross-section of American life that feels both impossibly specific and disturbingly timeless. It’s more than a musical. More than a satire. More than a political drama.

Nominated for five Academy Awards and still a towering achievement in ensemble storytelling, Nashville holds up a cracked mirror to American identity—how we perform it, profit from it, and try to hold onto it even as it slips away.

July’s Volunteer Of The Month pick is Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, courtesy of River!

A meticulously crafted tale of murder, theft, pastry, poetry, and polite panic, The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson at his most whimsical, melancholic, and madcap. Set in a fictional Eastern European republic between the wars, the film charts the adventures of legendary concierge Gustave H. (a pitch-perfect Ralph Fiennes) and his loyal lobby boy Zero as they’re swept into a plot involving a stolen painting, a greedy family, prison breaks, fascists, and a disappearing world of civility.

Blending Anderson’s signature pastel-perfect aesthetics with a screwball crime caper and a poignant elegy for lost elegance, the film boasts an ensemble bursting at the seams: Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Jeff Goldblum, F. Murray Abraham, Harvey Keitel, Léa Seydoux, Jude Law, and—of course—Bill Murray.

Fireworks, parades, patriotic bunting—and one sound that doesn’t belong. A scream? A gunshot? A tire blowout? No Fourth Of July celebration at The Frida would be complete without Brian De Palma’s 1981 masterpiece Blow Out!

John Travolta gives one of his best performances as Jack Terry, a sound technician for low-budget horror flicks who accidentally records a political assassination while gathering ambient sound one night. What follows is a paranoid plunge into reel-to-reel surveillance, media manipulation, and a conspiracy no one wants to hear.

A riff on Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Coppola’s The Conversation, but soaked in De Palma’s signature split-diopter style and operatic tension, Blow Out turns patriotic imagery into a nightmare canvas—stars and stripes flickering under streetlamps and firecrackers masking murder. Featuring Nancy Allen, John Lithgow in full psycho-mode, and a finale that literally weaponizes Independence Day spectacle, this is one of the sharpest political thrillers of the 1980s and one of De Palma’s true masterpieces.