Our Heist Hallucinations series is pulling off its final score of the year with Steve McQueen’s 2018 thriller Widows!
When a botched heist leaves four women widowed and drowning in debt, Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis) discovers that her late husband left behind a plan for one final job. With nothing left to lose, she recruits Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), and Belle (Cynthia Erivo) to finish the job…and settle a few scores of their own.
Based on the British television series and co-written by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), McQueen’s film is a sleek, bruising reinvention of the heist movie, using the mechanics of a robbery to explore ghe women left behind by a criminal world built for men. And the cast is stacked: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Daniel Kaluuya, Brian Tyree Henry, and Robert Duvall.
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Yes…or yes?
Our Heist Hallucinations series is going back to the criminal underworld with Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 cult classic Sexy Beast!
Retired safecracker Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) is enjoying a quiet life in Spain when a visit from his old associate Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) threatens to drag him back into the business. Logan has one last job in mind…a daring safe deposit heist in London. Oh, and he’s not taking “no” for an answer. What follows is an unhinged descent into the criminal underworld unlike any other crime film you’ve ever seen.
Glazer’s electrifying debut balances a meticulously-planned heist with a psychological showdown between two unforgettable characters. And then there’s Ben Kingsley, giving one of the great left-field performances of his career as the absolutely terrifying Don Logan. Add in Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman, and a script that crackles with menace, and Sexy Beast is one hell of a way to get your heist on.
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Love that burns fast but lasts forever.
Our Heist Hallucinations pick for November is Leos Carax’s 1986 exquisitely stylized sophomore feature, Mauvais Sang!
Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner’s son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is sweeping the country. It’s spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment.
A dazzling genre-mash of neo-noir, science fiction, crime, and doomed romance that’s anchored by unforgettable performances from Denis Lavant, Juliette Binoche, and Michel Piccoli, Mauvais Sang announced Carax as one of the most audacious voices of the French cinema of the 1980s.
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A mid-career masterwork by legendary Hungarian art house auteur Béla Tarr and the first of his internationally acclaimed trilogy of films written in collaboration with author László Krasznahorkai (including the legendary Sátántangó), Damnation is the second film in our Béla Tarr Retrospective.
The film chronicles the doomed affair between bar Titanik regular Karrer (Sátántangó’s Miklós B. Székely) and the cruel cabaret singer (Vali Kerekes) he pines for while scheming to displace her brutish husband (György Cserhalmi).
A poignant Communism allegory that solidified Tarr’s unique aesthetic, Damnation is photographed in an exquisitely black & white palette underscored by the mesmerizing long takes that would come to be his trademark.
Damnation has been restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by the Hungarian National Film Institute Film Archive under the supervision of Béla Tarr himself.
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Come celebrate the new movement of young filmmakers devouring the medium with their intense, cinematic visions with this double feature of two bold, boundary pushing, & incendiary debut feature films that compliment each-other: the hot-boiled angst of the timely ABRAXAS (Written, Directed, Edited, & Starring Charles Tyler Kinder) & the synthetic, neon-drenched, liminal nightmare fuel that schizoids out of the screen into your senses with FaceTape (Written, Directed, Edited, Shot, Sound Designed by Manny Liotta).
Made in unison with each other with a blend of cast members between the two films, this is a double feature that you won’t walk away from feeling the same as when you entered the theater!
ABRAXAS (85 min): Struggling to complete his college thesis, a frustrated environmentalist starts to receive “divine inspiration” which liberates him from writer’s block. However, as his ideas intensify, he spirals into a dangerous fixation, crafting an enraged manifesto against techno-industrial civilization. Watch the trailer for it here!
FaceTape (84 min): A junkie decides to come clean from abusing an analog VR drug called FaceTape only to find his life outside of his addiction is far from stable. Watch the trailer here!
There will be a 10 minute intermission between each film and an introduction by the filmmakers!
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How many times does it take to steal the same diamond?
Our Hallucinations series is getting heisty as we present the 1972 classic The Hot Rock!
Robert Redford stars as John Dortmunder, a professional thief who assembles a motley crew to steal a priceless diamond from the Brooklyn Museum…only for the heist to go spectacularly, hilariously wrong. Based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel and scripted by William Goldman, this caper is classic ’70s New York fun.
In peak ’70s heartthrob mode, Robert Redford is the real hot rock here, putting yet another effortlessly cool performance onto his resume. Also starring George Segal, Ron Leibman, Paul Sand, Moses Gunn, and Zero Mostel, it’s wildly entertaining caper from director Peter Yates (Bullitt) with a screenplay by the legendary William Goldman. What else could you possibly want!?
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Just added: before our 10PM screening on Friday, September 18th, DJ OLDBOY will be joining us to spin some vinyl inspired by the the film’s soundtrack, all while decked out in full Drive cosplay! Fans of Electronic, Synth-Pop, and Dream-Pop should not miss this pre-show!
There are no clean getaways.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is back at The Frida to celebrate its 15th anniversary with some very special In Remembrance screenings for Kavinsky, whose iconic song “Nightcall” helped define the film’s unforgettable neon-noir atmosphere.
Ryan Gosling stars as The Driver, a quiet Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver and finds himself pulled into a dangerous world of criminals and forbidden romance.
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and featuring Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, and Ron Perlman, Drive has been electrifying audiences at The Frida Cinema for over a decade since we first played it. And most of that can be attributed to the film’s brilliant soundtrack, which is a synth-soaked masterpiece featuring artists like Kavinsky, Chromatics, Desire, College & Electric Youth, and Cliff Martinez.
Enhanced Accessibility: this film has Closed Captioning capability!
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From the most delinquent duo in animation comes…Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, celebrating its 30th anniversary at The Frida Cinema!
Beavis and Butt-Head are back! And this time, they’re hitting the road! When their beloved TV is stolen, the two slackers set off across America in search of it, stumbling into a bizarre conspiracy that may have much bigger consequences than either of them could possibly comprehend.
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America is a gloriously stupid, endlessly quotable time capsule of ’90s MTV culture. Mike Judge expands his beloved animated series to the big screen without losing its gleefully juvenile sense of humor, sending America’s favorite metalhead idiots on a chaotic cross-country adventure. Come see it on the big screen with new and old fans alike!
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It’ll come as no surprise to any Jonathan Demme fan to find one of his films in our Unsung 80’s Soundtracks series. From the filmmaker who gave us Q Lazzarus’ “Goodbye Horses,” Bruce Springsteen’s Oscar-winning “Streets of Philadelphia,” and, of course, the electrifying sounds of Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, comes 1986’s Something Wild, a quirky romantic comedy that gradually turns into…well, something quite wild.
Jeff Daniels stars as Manhattan businessman Charles Driggs, a relatively square individual whose uneventful life is upended when he meets the mysterious and free-spirited Lulu (Melanie Griffith). After she impulsively “kidnaps” him from a restaurant, the two head out on a road trip that becomes increasingly unpredictable adventure when they cross paths with Lulu’s dangerous ex-husband, Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta). Funny, sexy, strange, and surprisingly unsettling, Something Wild is one of the great genre-shifting movies of the 1980s, and an early showcase for the late, great Liotta.
Demme fills his film with a remarkably eclectic mix of ’80s new wave, punk, rock, and pop, featuring Talking Heads, New Order, The Feelies, The Pretenders, and others. The music doesn’t simply serve as background decoration; it helps chart the film’s transformation from playful road movie to something darker. The soundtrack was released as a compilation alongside the film, and like so much of Demme’s work, it reflects a director with an unusually sharp ear for music, and a knack for finding exactly the right song for the moment.
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“Get the funk up!” Our Unsung 80’s Soundtracks series continues with Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman – or what happens when a movie studio also owns the recording contract of a pop superstar!
One of the defining films of its decade, Batman stars Michael Keaton as billionaire Bruce Wayne, who secretly spends his nights stalking the streets of Gotham City as the costumed vigilante Batman. As Batman closes in on dastardly villain Joker (Jack Nicholson, oozing charismatic menace), he also finds himself drawn to photojournalist Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger). With Burton’s gothic visual style, Danny Elfman’s soaring score, and Oscar-winning Art Direction-Set Decoration by Anton Furst and Peter Young, Batman proved that a comic-book movie could be dark, stylish, and strange, while also humorous and wildly entertaining.
Batman is something of an unusual entry in the soundtrack canon, with two very different albums coming out of the film. Danny Elfman’s orchestral score became one of the most recognizable superhero themes ever written, while Prince was brought in to create a separate album of songs inspired by the film. The resulting Batman soundtrack became a massive commercial success, spending six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and spawning hits including “Batdance,” “Partyman,” and “Scandalous.” The album was conceived around the Joker and Vicki Vale, with Burton reportedly giving Prince a rough cut of the film to inspire the songs. Elfman’s score and Prince’s album rarely appear together in the film, but both became essential parts of the movie’s identity, making Batman one of the biggest soundtrack phenomena of the 1980s.
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