Director Lauren Garroni’s new thriller Sugar Baby is coming to The Frida Cinema!
An enterprising Sugar Baby is offered $30,000 to move in with her Sugar Daddy for the week, but soon discovers the sinister secrets trapped within his home.
Read MoreGenre: Comedy
Hot off of screening at Toronto International Film Festival, The Frida Cinema is excited to present weeklong run of Sam Hayes’ new film Pools.
Kennedy has one day to get her shit together or get kicked out of school for good. Instead of buckling down, she rallies a ragtag crew for a midnight pool-hopping adventure through the lavish estates of her college town. But under the surface, Kennedy is searching for answers to the questions tearing her up inside in the wake of her father’s death. As the secrets spill, this wild escape becomes a cathartic journey of self-discovery.
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Love, Brooklyn is about Brooklynite writer assigned with writing a piece on the borough’s renaissance post-COVID. With his work deadline looming, he bikes around the borough, and at the same navigates the complexities of intertangled relationships in his life, including with: Casey (Nicole Beharie), his gallerist ex-girlfriend whom he is trying to remain friends with and who is dealing with her own professional deadlines; Nicole (DeWanda Wise), his new situationship who is a recent widow and new single mother studying to be a massage therapist; and Alan (Roy Wood Jr.), his best friend who is increasingly interested in cheating on his wife. Like Brooklyn itself, our characters are at moments in their lives where they need to leap forward while also needing to hold onto the pasts that have shaped them.
Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Love, Brooklyn is a deeply romantic film, focusing on the connections of these characters and how they choose to operate within a changing world, both individually and together. The film’s tone is remarkably lovely in a way that we so rarely get to see from romantic dramas.
The film is the debut feature from filmmaker Rachael Abigail Hodler, and a large part of her intention in achieving this tone was to tell a story of Black people that isn’t seeped in tragedy. As she put it in her director’s statement from the film’s Sundance press notes: “As a filmmaker, I want to tell stories about sensitive Black people who cry and feel, in life not tragic or saccharine… I hope to expand the representation of what it means to be Black and what’s cool about this moment of inclusion in storytelling is that I don’t have to try to represent Blackness as a whole or all Black people. I can be really specific with how I see people, how they love, hide from love and ultimately show up for it. I want to show the soft parts of the people who look like me. I want to show the sensitive bits that show up, not when we are in danger or inferior but when we are in love.”
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The Baltimorons is a mirthful and intimate holiday gem—Jay Duplass’s solo directorial debut since 2012—that transforms a cracked tooth into a night of transformative encounters. Against the wintry backdrop of Baltimore, an unlikely romance unfolds between a newly sober comedian and his reserved dentist in a walk-and-talk odyssey of quiet humor, emotional honesty, and offbeat charm.
Winner of SXSW’s Audience Award, this modestly magnetic film is both a gift to indie lovers and a tender celebration of connection in the most unexpected of hours.
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Directed and co-written by acclaimed actress Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), The Balconettes is her audacious second feature. Co-scripted with Céline Sciamma, it melds comedy, horror, thriller in a genre-smashing good time!
The story is set in a heat wave that brings a Marseille neighborhood to the boil, where three roommates gleefully meddle in the lives of their neighbors from their balcony. Until a late night drink turns into a bloody affair…
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From Jared Hess, the offbeat mind behind Napoleon Dynamite, comes the legendary story of a Mexican monk who moonlighted as a luchador — Nacho Libre!
Jack Black stars as Ignacio, a monastery cook with big dreams of wrestling glory. By day, he tends to orphans with meager meals and modest means, but by night, he dons a homemade mask and cape to become “Nacho” – a bumbling yet big-hearted fighter who enters the chaotic world of Lucha Libre. Teaming up Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez), a wiry street thief with zero wrestling skills but plenty of scrappy determination (and a firm belief in science), Nacho must balance his secret life in the ring with his devotion to the children he cares for, all while chasing respect, redemption, and the heart of the beautiful Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera).
Wildly silly yet surprisingly sincere, Nacho Libre is a raucous underdog tale full of slapstick humor, colorful characters, and Jack Black at his most gloriously unhinged.
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Volunteer of the Month pick, selected by one of September’s Volunteers of the Month – The Amazing Trevor!
Set in the smoggy sprawl of 1970s Los Angeles, Shane Black’s (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3) The Nice Guys stars Ryan Gosling stars as Holland March, a bumbling private eye barely keeping it together. When his path collides with Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), a tough-as-nails enforcer with a knack for violence, the unlikely duo find themselves investigating the apparent suicide of a porn star and the disappearance of a young woman, leading to the unraveling of a conspiracy that winds from the seedy underbelly of Hollywood to the highest levels of power.
Fast, funny, and packed with action, The Nice Guys is a stylish throwback to mismatched-detective classics – a buddy-cop mystery / neo-noir comedy that’s laced with irreverent humor, outrageous set pieces, and two irresistible lead performances.
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Linda Linda Linda is celebrating a 20th anniversary with a brand new 4K restoration via our friends at GKIDS!
For Kei, Kyoko, and Nozomi, their dream of playing the final high school concert together is dashed when their lead vocalist quits the band. Desperate, they recruit the very first person they see: Korean exchange student Son, played by Doona Bae (The Host, Broker), whose comprehension of Japanese is limited at best. It’s a race against time as the group struggles to learn three songs in three days for the festival’s rock concert.
Linda Linda Linda is an effervescent, tenderhearted snapshot of youth about the unparalleled joy of jamming out with your friends. The soundtrack fuses bangers from iconic Japanese bands The Blue Hearts and Base Ball Bear with original music composed by James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins. The beloved classic from Nobuhiro Yamashita (Ghost Cat Anzu) is acknowledged by many as one of the greatest Japanese films of the 21st century.
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What do you get when you have three generations of comedians in one family, and someone dies? If you guessed an independent autobiographical self-funded feature-length dark comedy, you’d be absolutely right. D(e)AD is written by and starring Isabella Roland (Dropout.tv, Sex Lives Of College Girls); and directed by and starring Isabella’s mom, Claudia Lonow (creator/showrunner of How to Live With Your Parents for the Rest of Your Life, Accidentally on Purpose, Good Girls Don’t and Rude Awakening); and also the rest of their family.
Tillie (Isabella Roland), a floundering young woman and her charismatic, alcoholic father (Craig Bierko), struggle to resolve their fractured relationship in the weirdest possible way: after he dies, his ghost appears in mirrors to haunt everyone in the family but Tillie. Tillie’s sister, Violet (Vic Michaelis), mother (Claudia Lonow), grandparents (Mark Lonow and Joanne Astrow), stepfather (Jonathan Schmock), and even Violet’s free-spirited baby daddy (Nick Marini), must do everything they can to make Tillie see her father… even employing a very reform rabbi (Eddie Peppitone) to exorcize him… or else they will be plagued by this ghost forever.
Just added: after the screening, we will be joined by Izzy Roland, Claudia Lonow, and Jonathan Schmock for a special in-person Q&A!
Tickets are $15 for this special event and $40 for a ticket + exclusive poster for the film!
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You asked. You manifested it. Only you are to blame. Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is coming back for a one-night-only descent into madness, messiah complexes, and post-apocalyptic SoCal chaos as part of our In Defense Of…series courtesy of our founder and Executive Director Logan Crow! And as a fun bonus, we are screening the rarely-seen Cannes Cut of the film!
A delirious, genre-melting fever dream from the director of Donnie Darko, this sci-fi satire is part dystopian epic, part musical, part political prophecy—and 100% unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Set in a fractured near-future America (or was it 2008?), the film stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a paranoid action star with amnesia, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star turned media mogul, and Seann William Scott as…twins?
Infamously booed at Cannes and boasting a cool 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, Southland Tales has since earned a devoted cult following for its audacity, ambition, and total refusal to color inside the lines. Love it, hate it, or leave the theater slightly altered—this is a film that demands to be experienced loud, big, and with other humans asking, “Wait, was that Justin Timberlake lip-syncing The Killers?”
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