Jackie Chan’s Police Story is turning 40 years old—and we’re bringing it back to the big screen at The Frida Cinema for a limited run!
Before CGI, before Hollywood figured out who Jackie Chan was, and before every action hero pretended to risk their life for the shot—there was Police Story. Directed by and starring Chan at the absolute height of his powers, this Hong Kong masterpiece redefined the genre with bone-breaking stunts, insane choreography, and a perfect blend of comedy, chaos, and pure cinematic adrenaline.
Chan plays Inspector Chan Ka-Kui, a cop framed for murder who takes on a corrupt system with nothing but fists, loyalty, and an unbreakable moral code. What follows: exploding shanty towns, bus-top chases, and one of the most legendary mall-set finales in action history. (Yes, that glass-shattering pole-slide.)
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Jack Hill’s Coffy is coming back to The Frida Cinema, guns blazing and ready to burn it all down courtesy of our friends at See It On 16MM!
Long before Tarantino crowned her a legend, Pam Grier became one with Coffy—an explosive, no-holds-barred blaxploitation classic that put her front and center as the fiercest, flyest, most fearsome avenger in ’70s cinema. Dressed to kill (and very often undressed to kill), Coffy is a nurse by day, vigilante by night, taking down the pushers, pimps, and politicians who poisoned her little sister with heroin.
Directed by cult master Jack Hill, Coffy is pure grindhouse satisfaction: outrageous action, killer dialogue, sleazy villains, slow-motion shotgun blasts, and Grier—an absolute force of nature in every frame. This isn’t just revenge—it’s a revolution in heels.
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Banned. Protested. Worshipped. See It On 16MM is back with another screening on celluloid, and this time it’s John Waters’ dirty masterpiece Pink Flamingos!
Welcome to Baltimore’s trashiest backyard, where the grass is plastic, the chickens are nervous, and Divine reigns supreme. Part shock comedy, part underground rebellion, Pink Flamingos (1972) is John Waters’ cult atomic bomb—an unholy hybrid of sleaze, satire, and pure punk provocation that shattered the rules of good taste and built a throne from the pieces.
Starring the legendary Divine in her filth-crowned breakout role, Pink Flamingos follows a depraved battle for the title of “Filthiest Person Alive,” with kidnappings, foot-licking, meat theft, and one very infamous dog-walk that sealed the film’s place in midnight movie infamy. The competition? Mink Stole and David Lochary as the Marble family—suburban perverts running a black market baby ring out of a pink split-level. It only gets worse (and by worse, we mean better) from there.
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A titan of repertory cinema, Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece Heat, is back at The Frida Cinema for some August encores!
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.
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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.
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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.
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Taking our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series into the 90’s is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s heart-pounding 1997 thriller Cure, widely regarded as one of the best, most original, and most influential psychological horror films of the decade.
A detective investigates a string of grisly murders—each victim killed in the same ritualistic manner, each murderer caught at the scene, unable to explain why they did it. The only connection? A mysterious drifter who seems to erase people’s memories—and unlock something buried deep inside them.
With icy precision and a creeping sense of dread, Cure is not just a murder mystery—it’s a meditation on identity and unraveling. Shot in long, haunting takes and drained colors, the film moves like a fog over post-economic-boom Japan: quiet and uncertain.
Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. This July-October, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century. All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles, at a reduced ticket price of $8.
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Based on the real-life story of serial murderer Akira Nishiguchi, Vengeance Is Mine is the next film in our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series! The story follows Iwao Enokizu, a charming drifter and remorseless killer who leaves a trail of death and deception across Japan. But this is not a crime thriller—it’s a forensic excavation of a man’s broken psyche and a nation’s suppressed demons.
Director Shohei Imamura—known for his fascination with society’s underbelly—eschews sensationalism for something more disturbing: a portrait of evil not as anomaly, but as a product of postwar dislocation, generational trauma, and cultural repression. This is Japan far removed from the poetics of Ozu or the mythic ghosts of Kobayashi.
Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. Each Monday this July-September, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century! All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles!
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Equal parts Spaghetti Western, French New Wave, and hard-boiled noir, Takashi Nomura’s A Colt Is My Passport (original Japanese title: Koruto wa ore no pasupôto) is coming back for a few encores to start off September! Joe Shishido (and those famously surgically-enhanced cheeks for which he became known) stars as a stoic gun-for-hire navigating a botched assassination, double-crosses, and a bloody standoff at the edge of town.
With stark black-and-white cinematography, stylized action, and a jazzy score, the film plays like a fusion of Jean-Pierre Melville and Sergio Leone, all filtered through the lens of late-’60s Japanese cynicism. It represents the turn in Japanese cinema from introspective postwar realism to a new wave of genre experimentation and rebellion.
Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. Each Monday this July-September, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century. All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles, at a reduced ticket price of $8.
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This year’s Segerstrom at The Frida series kicks off with Some Like it Hot, Billy Wilder’s hilarious 1959 screwball comedy that follows two down-on-their-luck musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), who witness a gangland massacre and flee Chicago disguised as women in an all-female band on their way to a Florida resort. On the run, they become Josephine and Daphne, traveling with the enchanting Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), a singer with dreams of marrying a millionaire. Romantic entanglements and mistaken identities spiral out of control in a Florida resort, culminating in what many consider to be one of the funniest comedies of all time.
See the movie. then experience the brand new Tony and Grammy Award-winning stage musical! Running October 7 – 19 at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, experience the “glorious, toe-tapping, razzle-dazzling” (Deadline) Some Like it Hot! Visit scfta.org/events/2025/some-like-it-hot for info and tickets!
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