Enter the world of visionary filmmaker Jean Cocteau, as we take you to where it all began–The Blood Of The Poet!
Part silent cinema séance, part avant-garde fever dream, The Blood of a Poet was made in collaboration with the legendary Vicomte de Noailles and shot in the aftermath of a scandalized art world, the film plays like a lucid dream you’re not entirely sure you woke from.
Banned, booed, and eventually canonized, The Blood of a Poet is not a film that explains itself. It folds in on itself—layered with Catholic iconography, queer longing, and the kind of experimental imagery that would echo through Lynch, Jarman, and surrealists for decades to come.
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The Testament of Orpheus is the final film in our Jean Cocteau series—a dreamlike self-portrait where the artist literally walks through his own creations. Time bends, reality slips, and Cocteau—the mythmaker—steps in front of the camera to reflect on art, death, and immortality in a world of symbols and shadows.
Part sequel, part epilogue to Orpheus, the film brings back familiar faces (including Jean Marais and María Casares), and introduces cameos from Cocteau’s contemporaries, including Pablo Picasso and Jean-Pierre Léaud. It’s a meditation on legacy and the surreal power of cinema to blur what is real and what is imagined.
Shot in luminous black and white among ruins and strange halls, The Testament Of Orpehus is less a narrative than a moving poem—an invitation into the inner sanctum of one of the 20th century’s greatest visionaries.
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Celebrate the birthday of visionary director Jean Cocteau as we present a special run of Beauty and the Beast!
Born July 5th, 1889, Jean Cocteau was a poet, painter, playwright, and filmmaker whose imagination knew no borders—and no film better captures his singular vision than La Belle et la Bête (1946), a masterpiece of surreal romanticism that turns a fairy tale into living myth.
Starring Josette Day as the gentle, radiant Belle and the great Jean Marais as the tortured, leonine Beast, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast is a marvel of shadow, texture, and cinematic illusion. Made just after WWII on a shoestring budget and with raw ingenuity, the film conjures real magic without special effects. This isn’t Disney–it’s real cinema magic.
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The final film in our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 masterwork After Life!
In After Life, the recently deceased arrive at a waystation between this world and the next. Their task? To choose a single memory from their lives to take with them into eternity. A small team of counselors helps each soul re-create that memory on film, allowing them to move on—leaving everything else behind.
With a mix of actors and real interviews, After Life blurs the line between fiction and documentary, imagination and memory. The result is a quietly transcendent film that contemplates the meaning of life not through grand events, but through small, deeply human moments.
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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Closing our the August portion of our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Demon Pond! The story follows a Tokyo academic that stumbles into a remote village with a strange obsession: the locals ring a bell daily to prevent a mythical dragon from rising from the nearby pond and flooding the region. What begins as eccentricity becomes uncanny, as the boundaries between folklore and madness begin to blur.
Adapted from Kyōka Izumi’s 1913 play and reimagined with a theatrical, dreamlike visual language by New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda, this is a ghost story told in the language of myth and ritual. Part parable, part fever dream, Demon Pond is less about monsters and more about what it means to believe—and what it costs to stop.
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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Kicking off the August portion of our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Kwaidan, director Masaki Kobayashi’s fascinating meditation on memory, regret, and the delicate boundary between the living and the dead.
Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning “ghost story,” this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue comes at a cost. Blind musician Hoichi is forced to perform for an audience of ghosts. An author relates the story of a samurai who sees another warrior’s reflection in his teacup.
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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A haunting masterpiece of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu is the second film in our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series. Kenji Mizoguchi’s hypnotic camera work, long takes, and atmospheric composition make Ugetsu a meditative, otherworldly experience that influenced filmmakers from Kurosawa to Scorsese. Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, this is a film where myth and history blur, inviting us to reflect on the consequences of human folly.
Made just eight years after WWII, the film uses a ghostly narrative to process national memory and warn against repeating the same mistakes. Ugetsu exemplifies how Japanese filmmakers of the 1950s turned to allegory and aesthetics to navigate complex postwar identities—elevating cinema to poetry.
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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Our annual Segerstrom at the Frida series showcases films that inspired upcoming stage adaptations at OC’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts! Join us as we conclude our 2025 series by celebrating the 50th Anniversary of a Frida Cinema favorite, Monty Python and the Holy Grail!
Ranked among the top British films of all time by the BFI and various critics’ polls, directors Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones’ irreverent and absurdist reimagining of the Arthurian legend stars the Monty Python comedy troupe as King Arthur and his eccentric band of knights. The film follows their doomed quest for the Holy Grail through a series of loosely connected skits featuring killer rabbits, anarcho-syndicalist peasants, and a castle full of rude Frenchmen. With its low-budget charm, fourth-wall-breaking humor, and endlessly quotable dialogue, the film skewers everything from medieval epics to organized religion to British bureaucracy, all deliciously sandwiched between hilarious opening credits and a climax for the ages.
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Our annual Segerstrom at the Frida series showcases films that inspired upcoming stage adaptations at OC’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts! Join us as our 2025 series continues with the stunning new 4K Restoration of Sidney Lumet’s bold and imaginative reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, 1978’s The Wiz!
Set in a dreamlike version of New York City and brought to life with an all-Black cast, The Wiz stars iconic performer Diana Ross as Dorothy, a Harlem schoolteacher who gets swept away by a magical storm to a fantastical urban landscape. Along the way, she’s joined by a Scarecrow made of garbage (Michael Jackson), a Tinman from a Coney Island theme park (Nipsey Russell), and a cowardly Lion from the New York Public Library (Ted Ross). Infused with infectious musical numbers, Broadway flair, and stunning costume and set design, the film explores themes of self-discovery, community, and inner courage through a uniquely soulful lens.
We thank Universal Pictures for partnering with us to share their beautiful new restoration at The Frida as part of this series!
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The final film in our Technicolor Summer series reaches the celestial with A Matter of Life and Death—a visionary romance that floats between worlds, from war-torn Earth to the halls of a fantastical afterlife, in one of the most inventive films ever made.
David Niven stars as Peter Carter, a British RAF pilot who miraculously survives a doomed jump from his burning plane—only to fall in love with June (Kim Hunter), the American radio operator who heard his final words. But Peter was meant to die, and when the otherworldly authorities realize their clerical error, he must plead his case for life in a cosmic courtroom, where love itself becomes the ultimate argument.
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this genre-defying masterpiece blends romance, fantasy, and philosophical inquiry with dazzling visual artistry.
In the early 1930s, the 3-strip Technicolor process was introduced to audiences, inviting them to experience a world dripping with vibrant saturation for the very first time. The Technicolor Summer series ranges from familiar classics to rarely-screened gems all Summer long!
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