The members have spoken! We know it only came out a couple of years ago, but our Members Only screening for December is The Holdovers!
A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
Paul Giamatti’s performance as Paul Hunham cemented him as the most beloved sad-sack teacher since Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (which we are also playing in December!), Dominic Sessa’s breakthrough performance turned him into a sudden indie darling, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s heartbreaking turn became one of the year’s most celebrated, earning her an Oscar at the 2024 Academy Awards.
We love our Film Club Members, and our monthly exclusive Film Club Members Only screenings are just one of our ways of thanking them for their support! Not a Film Club Member yet? CLICK HERE to join our growing family of fellow film-lovers and Frida Cinema supporters!
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Just added: Frida Cinema Board Member/Trivia Night host Atalia Lopez (Chapman University) and Porter Gilberg (Frida Cinema Director of Development) will join us Tuesday 12/23 for a brief presentation on the film’s literary history and cinematic influences. An interactive discussion will take place immediately following the film.
Across our entire staff, if there was a movie we could all agree on being the definitive holiday season masterpiece of the past 25 years, it would be Todd Hayne’s Carol.
Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (are you kidding me?), the film is set in 1950s New York, and follows a shy young shopgirl and aspiring photographer, who becomes captivated by Carol Aird, an elegant woman trapped in a failing marriage. As the two grow closer, their connection deepens into a forbidden romance that threatens Carol’s custody battle for her daughter. Forced onto a road trip that becomes both an escape and a reckoning, the women must decide whether their love can survive the scrutiny and constraints of their time.
In the years since its release, Carol has become a pop-cultural touchstone that perfectly blends a holiday-season staple and queer cinematic landmark. For pop culture purposes, it’s perhaps the most GIFed slow-burn romance of the internet age. Its influence can be seen all over the rise of prestige LGBTQ+ storytelling across screens big and small. Some movies change your life forever.
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Update: Ticket Of No Return will now be a free screening! If you bought tickets already, they will be refunded and you can join us free of charge!
Our dearly beloved Director Of Operations, Martin, is leaving us at the conclusion of this year, so we wanted to give him a proper send-off by letting him program four of his favorite films. The penultimate film in his series, entitled The Last Dance, is Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket Of No Return!
This first film in Ulrike Ottinger’s Berlin Trilogy follows an unnamed woman (frequent Ottinger collaborator Tabea Blumenschein) as she drinks her way through Berlin’s various watering holes. Underscoring the scrutiny society applies to “women behaving badly,” with a literal Greek chorus questioning her actions, Ottinger’s film practically predicts the double standard imposed on late 20th-century female artists like Courtney Love.
Premiering at Cannes Critics Week in 1980 and today one of the artist’s most celebrated films, Ticket of No Return proves that “the New German Cinema didn’t live and die with Fassbinder” (Village Voice).
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Join Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, and the entire Muppet gang as we screen some special encores of The Muppet Christmas Carol!
Charles Dickens’ classic story gets the Muppet treatment as Ebenezer Scrooge (an extremely committed Michael Caine), a cold-hearted miser, is visited on Christmas Eve by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. With help from Kermit’s Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy’s Emily Cratchit, and a chorus of singing, joke-cracking Muppets, Scrooge is shown the impact of his greed — and given one last chance to open his heart and embrace the spirit of Christmas.
A little bit of Muppet mayhem is exactly what every holiday season needs. Don’t miss your chance to see this one on the big screen!
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Celebrate this holiday season with Greta Gerwig’s joyful, heart-full adaptation of Little Women from 2019. Starring an A+ cast of Saoirse Ronan, Florenge Pugh, Emma Watson, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, and Timothee Chalamet, it’s the perfect seasonal escape on the big screen.
The film follows the four March sisters—Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth—as they navigate love and heartbreak in Civil War–era New England. Told across intertwined timelines, the film traces their journey from spirited girlhood to adulthood as they fight to define their own futures.
Bring your friends, bring your family, and ring in the holidays with a film that celebrates sisterhood and the power of following your own path. Little Women has been adapted many times, but Gerwig’s version is the best interpretation yet, and might just be her magnum opus as director.
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Our Page To Screen series is closing out the year with legendary director Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, based on the book by Nancy H. Kleinbaum.
Set in an elite New England prep school in 1959, the story follows a group of students whose lives are upended by the arrival of John Keating (Robin Williams, in one of his most beloved performances), an English teacher who urges them to think for themselves, seize the day, and find their own voices in a world determined to quiet them.
Few films capture the spark of youth and the power of a great teacher like Dead Poets Society. All these years later, it remains a moving tribute to the teachers who changed us along the way.
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Our dearly beloved Director Of Operations, Martin, is leaving us at the conclusion of this year, so we wanted to give him a proper sendoff by letting him program four of his favorite films. The second film in his series, entitled The Last Dance, is the 2018 film An Elephant Sitting Still, from director Hung Bo.
In the Northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longer-for escape from the situation they find themselves in.
A gloomy, nihilistic mediation on life, An Elephant Sitting Still is a programmer’s dream to be able to play on the big screen. Thank you again to Martin for picking this under-seen downward spiraling masterpiece.
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Our dearly beloved Director Of Operations, Martin, is leaving us at the conclusion of this year, so we wanted to give him a proper send-off by letting him program four of his favorite films. First up in his series, entitled The Last Dance, is trailblazing auteur Márta Mészáros’ slice-of-life drama Adoption from 1975.
Through intensely intimate camerawork, Mészáros immerses the viewer in the worlds two women, each searching for fulfillment: Kata (Katalin Berek), a middle-aged factory worker who wishes to have a child with her married lover, and Anna (Gyöngyvér Vigh), a teenage ward of the state determined to emancipate herself in order to marry her boyfriend. The bond that forms between the two speaks quietly but powerfully to the social and political forces that shape women’s lives as each navigates the realities of love, marriage, and motherhood in her quest for self-determination.
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Billy Wilder’s timeless romantic dramedy The Apartment returns to the big screen with a new 4K restoration as we celebrate what would have been Jack Lemmon’s 100th birthday.
Bud Baxter is a minor clerk in a huge New York insurance company, until he discovers a quick way to climb the corporate ladder. He lends out his apartment to the executives as a place to take their mistresses. Although he often has to deal with the aftermath of their visits, one night he’s left with a major problem to solve.
Winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, The Apartment remains one of the great Hollywood stories about the courage to choose kindness in an unkind world. It’s the perfect aperetif to our Holiday Season programming.
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Rome has the talent to break out as a rapper, but his chance to impress a megastar producer is jeopardized when the only copy of his album is stolen.
So goes the story of the scrappy new Canadian indie film Boxcutter, screening on December 1st at The Frida Cinema!
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