Our Starring Natalie Wood series kicks off with the iconic 1955 Nicholas Ray landmark drama Rebel Without A Cause, in which she co-stars as Judy, going toe-to-toe with big fellow big screen icon James Dean. She earned herself an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the role–the first of her career.
After moving to a new town, troublemaking teen Jim Stark is supposed to have a clean slate, although being the new kid in town brings its own problems. While searching for some stability, Stark forms a bond with a disturbed classmate, Plato, and falls for local girl Judy. However, Judy is the girlfriend of neighborhood tough, Buzz. When Buzz violently confronts Jim and challenges him to a drag race, the new kid’s real troubles begin.
This Summer, we are celebrating the unforgettable star power of Natalie Wood with a quartet of films that showcase the unique blend of charisma and emotional intensity that made her one of Hollywood’s most beloved screen icons. This series is co-presented by the amazing folks over at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton as part of their exhibit More Than Love: The Life & Art of Natalie Wood!
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Real women take chances, have flaws and embrace life…
Celebrate Women’s History Month with a free screening of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award-winning film Real Women Have Curves,presented by our friends at the Segerstrom Center For The Arts!
America Ferrera stars in her feature film debut as a first-generation Mexican American student who finds herself juggling her own ambitions, her mother’s expectations and a community of women working together in an East Los Angeles garment factory.
Attendees of the screening will have the opportunity to win a pair of tickets to the West Coast premiere of Curves In Concert, a one night only concert adaptation of Real Women Have Curves: The Musical on Friday, March 20, 2026 at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. This performance features members of the original Broadway cast and includes a free 20-minute talkback/Q&A with the cast alongside original playwright, Josefina López.
Frida Cinema fans get 10% off tickets with code: CURVESCOMMUNITY at scfta.org/curves
Real Women Have Curves: The Musical features a Tony-nominated score by Grammy® Award–winning songwriter Joy Huerta (Jesse & Joy) and Benjamin Velez (Kiss My Aztec), a book by Lisa Loomer (Girl, Interrupted) with Nell Benjamin (Mean Girls), music supervision by Nadia DiGiallonardo (Waitress) and choreography and direction by Tony® Award winner Sergio Trujillo (Ain’t Too Proud)
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Pillion, the highly-anticipated new movie from filmmaker Harry Lighton, starring Alexander Skasgard and Harry Melling, is coming to The Frida Cinema!
The story follows Colin, a timid gay man, is swept off his feet when Ray, an enigmatic and impossibly handsome biker, takes him on as his submissive in a crazy and erotic BDSM-focused relationship.
The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival and won accolades for its screenplay and overall standout reception. It also earned multiple British Independent Film Awards, including Best British Independent Film.
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Who killed Laura Palmer?
Be still your beating heart, The Frida Cinema is finally bringing the original 94 minute Twin Peaks pilot to our audience!
Widely regarded as a landmark in television history, the pilot stunned audiences with its combination of small-town mystery and supernatural weirdness that only a dreamer like David Lynch could create. Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost established a tone that was at once familiar and made it completely and utterly disorienting, layering dark secrets and eery characters one after another, influencing decades of prestige television and cinema alike.
Join us, one night only, on Sunday, March 29th as we attempt to re-create appointment television viewing. Only this time, on a much bigger screen.
Doors open at 7:30PM and the show will begin at 8:00PM!
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By the mid-sixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, this supreme artist attained new levels of visual poetry. Celebrate 60 years of his iconic film as we present it as a limited engagement, recently restored for the big screen.
In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference that would prove to be one of cinema’s most influential creations.
Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by the great Sven Nykvist, Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth and one of the most influential films ever made.
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No miracle is ever too small.
Our Page To Screen series in March goes towards dark-edged fantasy with A Little Princess, director Alfonso Cuarón’s lush and emotional adaptation of A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
When her father enlists to fight for the British in WWI, young Sara Crewe goes to New York to attend the same boarding school her late mother attended. She soon clashes with the severe headmistress, Miss Minchin, who attempts to stifle Sara’s creativity and sense of self-worth.
Visually rich and deeply felt, A Little Princess has grown into a beloved 90s classic, a reminder that a little bit of fantasy can transform even the darkest circumstances.
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She climbed the ladder of success…wrong by wrong!
Kick off our Pre-Code Day celebration with a matinee screening of Baby Face, starring Frida Cinema favorite Barbara Stanwyck in one of her defining roles! And make sure to get their early as the co-author of Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era, 1930-1934, Kim Luperi, will be joining us to introduce the film and sign copies of her book in the lobby!
Stanwyck plays a young woman who, after a brutal upbringing, heads to New York and deliberately sleeps her way up the corporate ladder of a bank, using sex, charm, and sharp intelligence as tools for survival. The film is startlingly frank about exploitation and capitalism, barely bothering to moralize the lead character’s methods, which is exactly why censors cracked down on it soon after release!
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“I just killed a rat!”
Join us for our Pre-Code Day celebration of Heat Lightning, preceded by an in-person introduction by Kim Luperi, co-author of the TCM/Running Press book Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era, 1930-1934! Kim will also be signing and selling copies of her book in the lobby!
Set almost entirely at a desert roadside diner and gas station, the film follows two sisters running the business when a group of suspicious travelers arrives during a stormy night. What starts as a character drama about past regrets and hard-earned independence gradually turns into a pressure-cooker thriller involving crime and rekindled emotions.
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Four vignettes, each set in different decades from the 1950s through the 1980s, deal with protagonists at different stages of life between childhood and young adulthood. This is In Our Time, an anthology film from 1982, directed by Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, Jim Tao, and Chang Yi.
Often seen as a starting point for Taiwan’s great art house wave of the 1980s and marking a shift toward more realistic and socially grounded filmmaking, this landmark anthology is rarely seen, on the big screen or not. Focused on small emotional moments like family life, school, work, and the quiet anxieties of growing up, it’s this exact type of naturalism became a defining trait of the movement that followed and established the career directors who later defined the entirety of new-age Asian cinema.
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Some wars never end.
Our first Volunteer Of The Month pick comes courtesy of Nick V, as he has selected Spike Lee’s thought-provoking after-war drama Da 5 Bloods.
Four African-American Vietnam veterans return to Vietnam in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader and the promise of buried treasure. They battle forces of humanity and nature while confronted by the lasting ravages of the immorality of the Vietnam War.
Widely seen as one of his most passionate, politically urgent, and performance-driven films (specifically by Delroy Lindo, who should have been nominated for an Oscar), Da 5 Bloods is Spike Lee firing on all cylinders, delivering a deeply personal project that sparks debate and sticks with people long after the credits role.
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