Celebrate 25 years of Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love with a brand new 4K restoration and a post-screening nine minute short film entitled In The Mood For Love 2001.

In The Mood For Love: Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past 25 years of cinema.

In The Mood For Love 2001: Initially conceived as one third of a triptych about food, In the Mood for Love was expanded into a stand-alone feature that won immediate recognition as a modern-day classic. Another third—intended as the “dessert,” as Wong Kar Wai has put it—was, until now, only screened during his masterclass at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Now available in wide release for the first time, In the Mood for Love 2001 demonstrates the director’s masterful ability to generate palpable atmosphere and striking characterizations on a miniature canvas—with In the Mood for Love stars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung Man Yuk once again providing the sizzling chemistry— evoking the mystery of transient, unexpected connections in the modern city through his inimitable romantic touch.

A titan of repertory cinema, Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece Heat, is back at The Frida Cinema as part of our Val Kilmer Tribute series!

A towering epic of crime and consequence, Heat is the film where everything came together: De Niro vs. Pacino, Mann at full power, and Los Angeles lit like a dream you don’t want to wake up from. It’s a genre-defining masterpiece that changed the way crime films look, sound, and move.

Robert De Niro is Neil McCauley, a master thief planning one last score. Al Pacino is Vincent Hanna, the obsessive LAPD detective on his trail. Their lives orbit each other in parallel—both masters of their craft, both isolated by it. When they finally sit down face-to-face in a now-legendary diner scene, the movie bends time around them.

With a killer ensemble cast (our beloved Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Tom Sizemore, Diane Venora, Natalie Portman, Jon Voight, and many more), an iconic synth-and-guitar score by Elliot Goldenthal, and shootouts that redefine the word intense, Heat is more than a crime film–it’s pure cinema.

Our second Volunteer Of The Month screening comes courtesy of the amazing Ashley, as she has picked Strange Days, now celebrating its 30th anniversary!

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, and dropped into theaters at the tail end of 1995, Strange Days imagined the future as 1999—and it still feels prophetic. A blistering mix of cyberpunk noir, apocalyptic paranoia, and visceral street-level urgency, the film follows Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a black-market dealer of “playback” clips—full-sensory VR experiences recorded straight from the mind—who stumbles onto a murder, a conspiracy, and a revolution in the making.

Set during the final 48 hours of the millennium in a decaying, riot-torn Los Angeles, Strange Days explodes with Y2K anxiety, racial tension, police brutality, and techno-addiction—all filtered through Bigelow’s kinetic, hyper-physical direction and a pounding industrial score.

Join us for three talent-packed nights of unscripted comedy as we team up with OCIF to bring you the OC Improv Fest 2025!

First held in 2013, the Orange County Improv Festival was conceived to celebrate the growing and diverse improv community of Orange County, California. Despite prevailing opinions that Orange County is a homogenized wasteland devoid of culture, the OC Improv Fest seeks to expose the vibrant comedy taking place behind the “Orange Curtain.” The largest improv event in Orange County, the OC Improv Fest is committed to the celebration and elevation of improvisation, as well as forging friendships across cities and states with diverse and open-minded performers.

All performances are live, unscripted, and unrated. Line-ups subject to change.

 Friday Block 1 (7:00pm)

Classy Lady Improv Team

Jac’s Queens & Kings

Tertiary Guests

Heatwave

Mom & Dad Are Fighting Again

Bumbled

Friday Block 2 (9:20pm)

Scrabble Bits

STEM Kidz

EGOT

Bitchin’

Silent Partners

Pushing Desis

Ends 11:20pm

For full improv team line-up, workshops, FAQs, visit: https://improvcollective.fun/ocif